The march toward open source is rapidly turning into an all-out race, with research projects and applications extending to new industry sectors, including communication providers. What started out in the software realm has moved into the hardware space, bringing with it significant changes for providers and vendors alike. Most recently, the Open Compute Project (OCP) and its spin-offs, including the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have not only reinforced this shift toward open source, but have accelerated the trend.
The open source approach is about more than just lower costs. Improvements in innovation, reliability, security and flexibility are giving providers greater control of their development roadmap. Importantly, the current roster of projects indicates a strong relationship between the shift to open source and the trend toward virtualization. These projects and initiatives set the stage for communications providers to create new differentiated services and to deploy them quickly.
The list of cloud-related open source projects and organizations launched in recent years specifically focused on communication provider requirements is long and growing. Some of these projects focus on Software Defined Networking, such as ONOS, ODL, and OpenContrail. Other projects concentrate on operations, management and cloud orchestration, such as OpenStack or the Open Container Initiative. While certain projects look at the service layer (e.g. XOS), others attempt to bring together multiple groups through reference implementations (OPNFV or CORD). With new organizations vying to move the industry to a new paradigm (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), more open source projects and organizations are expected to develop.
Read more at Wireless Week.
