2022 brought a great OpenWISP release, what will 2023 bring?

[Federico Capoano]

Hi Everyone,

this is going to be my last post of 2022, at least in my time zone, hehe!

2022 has finally brought the new generation of OpenWISP, which I used
to call OpenWISP 2, to a much more mature state.
Several organizations with which I used to work with when I was
employed by Caspur (then incorporated in the Cineca research
consortium) in Italy, the original organization who has the merit of
having kickstarted the development of OpenWISP 1 (back then built with
Ruby on Rails), have already migrated to OpenWISP 22.05 and a couple
more are in the course of migrating.
This year we also saw a lot of new users, new installations and
migrations all over the world: Europe, US, Mexico, Ecuador, Australia,
Kenya, India, South Africa and many others.
Use cases range from public wifi to hardware vendors, startups
building their own networking product and ISPs bringing internet
connection to rural areas.

I want to thank these organizations for all their financial support
and for believing in us, they made it possible to advance to the
current state of things.
I hope to make the list of our supporters public in the near future
after having obtained explicit permission to do so.

Many thanks also to the long-time contributors from TDT and the other
occasional contributors who helped us out during Google Summer of Code
and other events, your contribution has been paramount to push the
project forward.

Many thanks to Google for having accepted us into the 5th consecutive
year of their Google Summer of Code program!

The next release which will come out in 2023 will mostly build and
improve on the current latest release:

- more monitoring insights
- more efficiency and better default settings for scalability
- full DSA support on OpenWrt
- lots of bugs and problems solved (most of which we are already
backporting to the current release, but some cannot be backported
easily)
- improved docker support

Some areas which I would love to start working on, at least for the
design/planning stage:

- redesign config variable evaluation
- new configuration editor with support for showing templates and full
configuration of devices
- full support for configuring the default OpenWrt features via
OpenWISP (without the need of using custom syntax or custom files)
- allow optional enabling of configuration schema for additional
OpenWrt packages
- more tunnel automated provisioning (zerotier, softether)
- more monitoring insights (eg: RADIUS data)
- OpenWrt syslog collection, visualization, filtering and monitoring with alerts

These are possible features which could be started in 2023 and most
likely would end up being released in 2024.
I want to work on a public roadmap for these ideas, maybe there's more
people out there interested in joining forces.

To sum up, I believe 2023 will bring a new version of OpenWISP which
will be better than the current one, more robust and efficient, but it
will not bring major breakthroughs. It's a consolidation release.

However, I believe that after that we will start to work on improving
some core aspects which are paramount to start with the next major
phase of OpenWISP, which I like to call OpenWISP 3, in which we will
start supporting other embedded systems and/or standard network
management protocols, which is my ultimate and very personal goal with
OpenWISP: to provide a programmable network management platform aimed
at an heterogeneous set of networking technologies and vendors, hence
liberating many organizations from the dangers of vendor lock-in and
excessive centralization.

I wish you all a happy new year!

Best regards
Federico Capoano