Happy Friday, everyone! If you couldn't keep up with the news this week, no worries, the SDxCentral weekly news roundup is here. Focusing on the news bits surrounding software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and more, we have you covered.

COME TOGETHER

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) added Extreme Networks' Bithika Khargharia as the director of product and community management. Khargharia will continue with her role of principal architect of solutions and innovations at Extreme Networks as she works with the ONF.

vArmour announced the appointments of Dean Hickman-Smith as senior vice president of field operations, Demetrios Lazarikos as chief information security officer, and Zhiping Liu as head of threat security engineering.

Comcast and Lenovo are the newest members of the OpenDaylight Project. 

Cumulus Networks entered into a couple of partnerships. The first is with Akanda to offer support for Lightweight Network Virtualization (LNV), resulting in a complete networking stack for bare metal switches and enhanced VXLAN performance for multi-tenant clouds. Secondly, Cumulus partnered with PLUMgrid to give enterprises and operators the ability to deploy a unified overlay and underlay architecture for OpenStack clouds.

Ixia expanded its Channel Xcelerate Partner Program.

NEW SERVICES

Akanda released Akanda 1.0. An orchestration platform for OpenStack clouds, Akanda 1.0 handles delivery and management also supports important VNFs like routing, load balancing, and firewalls.

Microsoft Azure Marketplace will now offer StackStorm software as a certified product. Stackstorm also announced it will provide users with the ability to wire operations automation into Windows Server and Microsoft Azure services, like Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Blob storage.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Puppet Labs enjoyed its most successful quarter ever, with a current bookings run rate of $75 million, coinciding with its 10th year in the DevOps business.

SECURITY ALERT

Security vendor Cloudstrike disclosed a vulnerability that could affect many virtualization platfoms based on the KVM or Xen hypervisors. It's called the Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation (Venom), with "neglected" reflecting the fact that the vulnerable code is in an outdated floppy-disk routine. While the media was quick to compare Venom to Heartbleed, the OpenSSL vulnerability, Venom is arguably not as serious. Some experts say it's harder to exploit that Heartbleed. Moreover, Venom is not present in Amazon Web Services and does not affect VMware or Microsoft hypervisors.

Here’s what else SDxCentral covered lately: