The fourth release of ONOS, the open source SDN networking operating system for Service Provider networks, is now available for download.
“The ONOS community’s contributions are accelerating rapidly,” said Bill Snow, vice president of engineering at the ONOS Project. “ONOS’ open source community delivers new product enhancements and apps at the tremendous rate required to address the complexities of deploying carrier-grade SDN. Our research and education network deployments and global collaboration stimulate the development of innovative applications and ideas that enable us to successfully harden ONOS for carrier grade production environments.”
The new “Drake” release adds a number of significant new features and enhancements for further SDN and NFV use case enablement, including new security, configuration and application level feature sets with improvements to the northbound and southbound including REST, API and GUI additions.
Some highlights:
- By default, ONOS’ GUI and REST-based interfaces are now secured. SRI International and KAIST developed an early implementation of secure bundles called Security Mode ONOS for Drake.
- Transport Layer Security has been added for the east/west-bound communications and the Command Line Interface can also be secured for authenticated password-less access using public/private keys.
- Building on top of the general tunnel subsystem Huawei previously contributed to ONOS, the company has laid the foundation for future VXLAN support by supplying a VTN manager and VXLAN tunnel setup that aligns with OPNFV standards.
- Drake delivers the functions and building blocks required for ONOS to merge with the next version of OPNFV and will allow future use cases including NFV management and orchestration and the delivery of VNFaaS. ONOS’ OPNFV functionality is the result of collaboration between these two vital open source communities.
- ETRI delivered a subsystem for adaptive flow statistics collection to smartly sample flows without overwhelming the collection system as flows increase with scale. Criterion Networks contributed an IPv6 intents test suite available to the community to support apps while building on top of ONOS’ IPv6 support. Ericsson contributed the beginning of an analytics subsystem that collects data and stores it in a database so it may be analyzed and fed back into the system as automated actions. This specific Ericsson contribution is targeted for ONOS’ CORD use case to take information from the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) so ONOS can feed actions back into CORD.
- Drake adds GUI topology overlays for improved link highlighting, secure login via user interface, a virtual network resource manager, and a new DHCP server app capable of operating in an OpenFlow SDN environment.
- Drake adds the building blocks for a new northbound intent abstraction that will simplify the setup of cross domain constructs, or flows, and allows users to more easily address a particular domain with an intent. Fujitsu provided extensive assistance with Drake’s northbound and Huawei provided the OpenStack Neutron ML2 interface.
- In the southbound, Drake adds YANG ACL for NETCONF from Happiest Minds and PCEP and OVSDB plug-ins from Huawei. Drake begins laying the foundation for IGMP snooping with PIM-SSM and Multicast forward app enhancements from DirecTV; OpenFlow QoS meter support; and a metrics collection subsystem to collect information from devices and ports in the data plane.
- Drake also adds a new configuration subsystem that enables the configuration of multiple apps instead of having to use individual configuration files for each one. This delivers a central configuration utility so that operators can go to one place and setup configuration, not just for the ONOS’ core but for all apps. The new subsystem makes it much easier to deploy and manage apps, enables simplified use and will allow easy access to a more diverse app ecosystem.
In addition to contributing to ONF’s Atrium, ONOS has expanded collaboration with other open source communities to develop new distributions including work with the CloudRouter Project and it will soon be part of the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV).
Drake is available now at the ONOS downloads page here:
https://wiki.onosproject.org/display/ONOS/Download+packages+and+tutorial+VMs
