We’ve just wrapped up another in-person LF Networking Developer & Testing Forum, this time in San Jose, CA. Co-located with ONE Summit, the community gathered for two days of in-depth strategy discussions, face-to-face interactions and project planning. It was great to meet face-to-face with new and existing community members and collaborate in person!
Projects covered in this event’s sessions included Nephio, ONAP, Anuket, L3AF, OpenDaylight and CNTi.
Given its earlier lifecycle, Nephio sessions took top billing at the event, with over 15 discussions across the two days, ranging in focus from R3 planning, to CI/CD, to implementing Kubernetes APIs, and more. Community members got a chance to learn from early adopters about their experience using Release 2 of Nephio in real-life scenarios and what they expect in R3. There were sessions dedicated to analyzing the existing architecture of the project and figuring out the scope of the next release. Having many of the Nephio community technical experts in the same room provided an opportunity to conduct deep dive technical evaluation of several key components and devise a plan for moving forward with their development. The presence of end users in the sessions enabled them to provide direct feedback to the developers and take an active role in shaping the future of the project.
Other notable sessions/discussions include:
Anuket
- The D&TF provided an opportunity for the Anuket community leaders to get in one room, evaluate the current state of the project and prioritize the next moves. That included planning the next releases (proposed merger of RA2 and RC2, the Kubernates branch of the Anuket architecture), but also a discussion involving the broader LFN community and telco ecosystem in general on how to stimulate additional contributions, now that the project has created so much value and is looking to continue setting industry standards.
CNTi
- The Cloud Native Telco Initiative (CNTi) under LF Networking has covered a lot of ground in recent months and got closer to an official release of the best practices, test tools, and certification program. During this D&TF event, the community working on this initiative held sessions with the broader LF Networking community, in which the current scope of the program was presented, and feedback was provided. Project communities such as Nephio got to learn about how the CNTi assets may be leveraged by their projects, giving them a head start on testing and certification. The CNTi community members benefited from the diversity of experience of the session audience. The highly interactive sessions provided valuable input regarding the perceived value of CNTi and where its focus should be.
ONAP
- The ONAP community had an opportunity to review new functionality and experience it first hands through a series of live demos. The voice of end users was heard, including a unique use case of the National Security Agency (NSA) that uses ONAP for securing 5G Networks. A common theme that came up in many of the ONAP sessions was external collaboration. This includes other open source communities such as Nephio and O-RAN-SC, as well as SDOs like ETSI and TMForum.
- The LF Networking developer and testing forums provide an excellent opportunity for communities to have meaningful discussions regarding their roadmap and future execution plans. This time the ONAP community focused on how to shape future releases of the project to evolve into an aggregate of lightweight independent modules, and move away from a monolithic platform.
AI Taskforce
- No event is complete these days without dedicating some attention to AI, and the D&TF was no different. The LF Networking AI Task force, that works on identifying ways to leverage AI for open networking, had an in-person meeting that was open to the community. It was an opportunity to reflect on the learnings so far, as documented in the recent white paper published by the task force. There was a lively discussion with the community, including academic research about what to focus on next in order to propel innovation in the intersection of Networking and AI.
For a full list of sessions and available presentation slides, visit here.
The importance of in-person developer events
Overall the event sessions had a high degree of interactiveness and audience participation. The less-structured nature of most of them, with ample time allocated for open discussion, gave an opportunity for attendees to share their thoughts in a non-formal environment. Having multiple tracks dedicated to different projects allows attendees to freely roam and attend sessions outside their own community, which proved to be very beneficial and led to many opportunities of cross-pollination of ideas. Many presenters and audience members were highly appreciative of the opportunity given to participate in this experience.
Stay tuned for updates on the next LFN Developer & Testing Forum!
