By Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Strategist, Verizon
It seems like it was only a blink of an eye, since the LFN board announced the upcoming merger of the CNTT Infrastructure workstream, with the OPNFV project. Ok, it was actually this past September, but in this new world of virtual everything, it could have been three thousand years ago. The official merger of the two projects will be in January, but there is much to do to get ready. So let us take a quick peek on what has been happening these past few months.
- Organization/Governance – A new organizational structure has been agreed upon, and in December, the member organizations elected an interim TSC that will serve as the governing organization for the next 9 months. It was decided that taking the interim path would reconcile the nominations and election cadence of the merging groups. The TSC has since elected co-chairs and is finalizing the other representative positions that are needed per the new organizational charter.
- Technical/Debt/TSC – This team is hard at work on determining how the workstreams will merge and interact at the technical level. So far this is no intention to changing tooling for now, but we will need to make some tooling and platform choices in the coming months.
- Marketing – The marketing team has been furiously working on creating the framework that will support the project and ensure that its mission and goals are heard by the larger Open Source and Telecom ecosystem.
We have a Name! At the October 2020 workshop after the marketing team and legal had whittled the choices down to four, the LFN community voted on the new name – Anuket. More to come on the interesting history and themes that the name evokes. All I will say now, is that the name truly reflects the values and objectives of the new community arising out of the CNTT and OPNFV meld.
We have a Mission Statement! “Empower the global communications community by creating and developing reference cloud infrastructure models, architectures, conformance programs and tools to deliver network services faster, more reliably, and securely.” OK you are thinking, so what does that have to do with anything and how does that relate to the goals and mission of Anuket? To give more context, a group of business and marketing minded folks from the OPNFV and CNTT projects got together to really delve into what the essence of the asperations of the new community. By creating a mission statement, we set a tone and guide to keep the project focused on what really matters for its success.
With that said, the LFN Anuket project’s mission is to enable members from the Telecom communities, operators and supporting companies alike, to mutually develop reference models, standardized reference infrastructure specifications and conformance frameworks for virtualized and containerized network functions and workloads, enabling faster and more robust onboarding into production, with the goal of reducing costs and accelerating telecom digital transformation. These artifacts include integrated, tested, and validated open software reference infrastructure (including interfaces to hardware) that will be used to design a conformance framework and validation programs. Ongoing strategic activities include collaboration with other standards bodies and evaluation of emerging technologies for the Telecom industry.
And finally, but certainly not least, we have a Logo! I know that as a bunch of engineers, marketing and branding is seen as just fluff, but seriously, determining the message is far more important to the ultimate success of the project than you might think. In that spirit, much thought has gone into our brand story. Over the past month or so, the marketing team, working with the very talented Brandon Wick, Heather Kirksey and Jim Baker from LFN, has developed a comprehensive and unified messaging that will form the foundation for all our project communications with the larger LFN community and our supporting organizations as we launch. Learn more about what went into our name and logo choices at our upcoming launch event.
The Anuket Launch Event will be held virtually on January 27th, 8:00 – 10:00 AM PT. Hear from community leaders and participating network operators about what Anuket is, the value of participation, and how to get involved. Register here!
