ONF and VOLTHA updates

[Andrea Campanella]

Hi All, 

I want to share with you some new exciting changes at ONF and with the VOLTHA project.

 

You may know that ONF has been in the process of growing/morphing into a more community-based model, optimized to foster and expand the developer community engaged around the ONF projects. We’ve recognized that with our strong project momentum, especially with VOLTHA, the time has come for us to move beyond the community’s reliance on the ONF development team to grow into a more classic open source org with the community leading and providing the majority of contributions to the projects.

 

You may also recall hearing that ONF's initial strategy for this transformation centered on the Ananki spin-out (announced last September), whereby a new separate for-profit organization was formed to commercialize ONF platforms. Ananki set out to become a new community member by raising venture funding and building a team that would be making contributions back into ONF’s projects.  In the process ONF engineers could move to Ananki as it grew, thus shifting engineering into the community while simultaneously growing and strengthening the ONF ecosystem.

 

The creation of Ananki has led to an unexpected yet exciting result. The Ananki plan has been significantly accelerated with Intel acquiring Ananki. Along with this, the ONF engineering team has joined Intel while making a commitment that Intel will continue to contribute and support ONF projects. With this highly synergistic reshuffling of resources, ONF now benefits from a stronger community. 

 

You can read the public announcement here: https://opennetworking.org/news-and-events/press-releases/onf-enters-a-new-era-focused-on-growing-adoption-and-community-for-its-leading-open-source-projects/

With this transition including the VOLTHA team, has now transitioned to Intel as of 5th of April 2022. 

I want to outline what this means for ONF, VOLTHA and the projects we are working on:

• ONF will still be hosting our community, the TST will stay in place and the open repositories will stay under the same locations in GitHub and Gerrit
• The Testing environment will remain active both the physical one with certification and the software (bbsim) based one. We have just moved the Berlin pod to a new location in a DT open lab to give broader access and we will move the Menlo Park infrastructure to a lab hosted by Radisys, who has committed to keeping it running. 
• The same process for merging features, bugs-fixes and roadmap will remain. 
• Matteo, Girish, Hardik and myself will slowly transition away from VOLTHA towards our new roles at Intel. But we will be doing this as Intel employees and members of the VOLTHA community
• Girish will remain part-time with ONF for a period to further ensure a smooth transition, but his focus will be on the transition - not on new contributions
• We will find, train and bring up to speed suitable replacements, both technical and for my TST chair position. 

VOLTHA is currently deployed in major service provider networks around the globe with live customers daily getting their key internet access through our open source code, this is something to be really proud of. 

This is an opportunity over the next months for each one of you in the community to step up and bring forward your expertise and leadership even more than before, to bring fresh and new ideas, guide the project forward and in even new directions. I am certain that through this great community the VOLTHA project will thrive and succeed even more than before, getting more and more adoption and deployments in the service provider’s networks. 

Feel free to reach out to me at andrea.c...@intel.com or on slack as usual. 

Cheers,

Andrea Campanella - ONF