AT&T made good on its plans to release its ECOMP SDN and NFV platform into the open source community through The Linux Foundation.
AT&T officially moved on its plans to migrate its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform into the open source community through The Linux Foundation.
The carrier said the move includes the release of source code, documentation, educational videos and a pair of sample use cases – one on virtual firewall and one on virtual domain name servers – into a public cloud for access to users and covered by the Apache 2.0 license. The code itself is said to use a continuous integration and continuous development environment and include 11 different modules set up as separate virtual machines with code in at least one container.
Stated goals of moving ECOMP into the open source community include delivering the capabilities for the design, creation, orchestration, monitoring and lifecycle management of virtual network functions in a software-defined networking environment.
“This Linux Foundation project and its ecosystem are critical to the platform’s success,” explained Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs and the carrier’s Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design, in a blog post. “This open source initiative under The Linux Foundation aims to create and foster a dynamic community. That means, you, the members and developers, and the collaboration you drive, will play a very critical role.”
AT&T unveiled the ECOMP initiative last year, which it said was designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. The carrier said it had been working on ECOMP for nearly two years, tackling the project due to a lack of guidance for network functions virtualization and SDN deployments in a wide area network environment.
ECOMP is said to provide automation support for service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management and SDN tasks. The platform is also designed to work with OpenStack, though the carrier noted it was extensible to other cloud and compute environments.
“We achieved the necessary performance, capital spending reductions and efficiency we expected as we moved to a software-defined network,” Rice said. “With more than two years of production experience, this unique software is ready for external real-world applications. That success drove the creation of this Linux Foundation project and community, leading to the availability of an open source platform derived from ECOMP.”
AT&T had previously announced ECOMP partnerships with a number of carriers and vendors, including Orange, Bell Canada and Amdocs. Other companies committed to the platform include Brocade, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel and Metaswitch.
“The launch of this project is one of the most momentous steps forward for open source networking,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “We are excited to facilitate the placement of this code into open source. With over two years of production experience, ECOMP allows users to create new services in an automated manner. We’re pleased to work with members to create a vibrant community to support this project’s success over the long term.”
Moving forward, AT&T said it was looking to garner greater acceptance of ECOMP as a platform for SDN and network functions virtualization deployments.
“Harmonizing SDN and NFV technologies benefits all communications industry members,” Rice added. “It takes unnecessary friction out of the system. It gives service providers more control of their network services. It also enables both developers and operators to create effective services at speeds never before possible.”
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