75 percent of the respondents in a recent survey [1] conducted for Red Hat said that being able to move OpenStack workloads to different providers or platforms was important (ranked 4 or 5 out of 5)–and a mere 5 percent said that this question was of least importance. This was just one of the answers that highlighted a general desire to avoid proprietary solutions and lock-in.

For example, a minority (47 percent) said that differentiated vendor-specific management and other tooling was important while a full 75 percent said that support for complementary open source cloud management, operating system, and development tools was. With respect to management specifically, only 22 percent plan to use vendor-specific tools to manage their OpenStack environments. By contrast, a majority (51 percent) plan to use the tools built into OpenStack–in many cases complemented by open source configuration management (31 percent) and cloud management platforms (21 percent). It’s worth noting though that 42 percent of those asked about OpenStack management tools said that they were unsure/undecided, indicating that there’s still a lot of learning to go on with respect to cloud implementations in general.

This last point was reinforced by the fact that 68 percent said that the availability of training and services from the vendor to on-ramp their OpenStack project was important. (Red Hat offers a Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack certification as well as a variety of solutions to build clouds through eNovance by Red Hat.) 45 percent also cited lack of internal IT skills as a barrier to adopting OpenStack. Other aspects of commercial support were valued as well. For example, 60 percent said that hardware and software certifications are important and a full 82 percent said that production-level technical support was.

The first release of the OPNFV project, Arno, is now available. The release, named after the Italian river which flows through the city of Florence on its way to the Mediterranean Sea, is the result of significant industry collaboration, starting from the creation of the project in October 2014.

This first release establishes a strong foundation for us to work together to create a great platform for NFV. We have multiple hardware labs, running multiple deployments of OpenStack and OpenDaylight, all deployed with one-step, automated deployment tools. A set of automated tests validate that deployments are functional, and provide a framework for the addition of other tests in the future. Finally, we have a good shared understanding of the problem space, and have begun to engage with upstream projects like OpenDaylight and OpenStack to communicate requirements and propose feature additions to satisfy them.

A core value of OPNFV is “upstream first” – the idea that changes required to open source projects for NFV should happen with the communities in those projects. This is a core value for Red Hat too, and we have been happy to take a leadership role in coordinating the engagement of OPNFV members in projects like OpenDaylight and OpenStack. Red Hat engineers Tim Rozet and Dan Radez have taken a leadership role in putting together one of the two deployment options for OPNFV Arno, the Foreman/Quickstack installer, based on CentOS, RDO and OpenDaylight packages created by another Red Hat engineer, Daniel Farrell. We have been proud to play a significant part, with other members of the OPNFV community, in contributing to this important mission.