Last year, we mapped out a comprehensive game plan and led the community in executing that plan to evolve OpenContrail to something more than a Juniper-led effort. We want it to be more broadly deployed than just carriers and service providers. Core to that plan was growing and diversifying the developer base beyond Juniper Networks.
At the ONS Summit in Los Angeles today, we announced two big milestones in that effort.
First, our migration to the Linux Foundation is complete. Since December, we’ve been working with the LF to address gating functions like charter docs, infrastructure management, and CLAs. Completing this move is important in that it gives our community a standard set of governance and licensing practices that are shared by many other open source initiatives.
Second, as part of this migration, the name of our project has been changed to Tungsten Fabric. Juniper Networks will retain the trademarks for its Juniper Contrail product line, so changing the name to Tungsten Fabric helps us avoid any market confusion over which is the commercial product and which is the open source project. It also opens the door to other commercial distributions all “powered by” the same open source project: Tungsten Fabric.
We’re also working with the LF Networking (LFN) board to move Tungsten Fabric into that networking umbrella organization. LFN was formed to curate a set of open networking projects into a sub-community, similar conceptually to the CNCF. By collaborating with the other LFN projects—ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, FD.io, DPDK, SNAS and PNDA—our community can more quickly respond to emerging use cases and resolve cross-project technical issues. We’ll keep you posted on this process.
Of course, Tungsten Fabric will remain a critical part of Juniper’s strategy around cloud-grade networking, delivering on the promises of open and scalable multicloud networking options. Placing the codebase and community at the LF is a proof point showing Juniper’s commitment to open networking and open source more generally.
Tungsten Fabric has an opportunity to become a ubiquitous, cloud-grade network fabric that’s agnostic to underlay infrastructure and able to extend across all cloud infrastructure. We want Tungsten Fabric to provide a single point of control, visibility, and management, globally or through open standards-based federation, for all networks and network security. It will become the most broadly adopted and highest quality SDN technology available when we deliver on that vision.
A lot is happening this week at ONS to make that vision real. The Tungsten Fabric community is here in force, talking about project status, use cases, and major roadmap initiatives. One major feature addition being discussed yesterday at the Tungsten Fabric Mini-Summit was the development of controller features to orchestrate EVPN in data center network fabrics. In short, the project is evolving beyond its network overlay roots.
Tungsten Fabric is the most widely deployed scalable, multicloud networking platform. We’ve got a great base to work from as we add new capabilities in collaboration with communities we’re already integrated with, including Kubernetes, Mesos, VMware and OpenStack. Tungsten Fabric users can already cover the waterfront: private cloud, hybrid cloud and major public clouds are already supported. Tungsten Fabric includes a high performance vRouter that connects container, VM and bare-metal applications, and a controller to orchestrate network overlays, switch fabrics and router gateways.
In short, Tungsten Fabric already lives up to the traits its name suggests: It’s strong, high-performance, and can handle the heat from running at scale in some of the world’s largest carrier environments with demanding networking requirements. Now, we’ll turn our attention to building on that base to bring Tungsten Fabric to the enterprise and to the edge.
This post would not be complete without a shout out to the contributors and community members who have helped build the community and guide this evolution: Aricent, AT&T, Bell, Cavium, CertusNet, CloudOps, CodiLime, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lenovo, Mellanox, Mirantis, Netronome, Orange, SDNEssentials, TechTrueUp and Yandex. It’s a community of powerful networking brands, and it’s growing.
Now is the time to get on board and get engaged with the Tungsten Fabric community. Join us on Slack (tungstenfabric.slack.com) and follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/tungstenfabric)
The world demands a truly global network fabric, one that works well for carrier-cloud scale, enterprises, and at the edge. Tungsten Fabric is becoming that network fabric, and we invite you to join us on the road ahead.
