OPNFV, (the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualisation) has just celebrated it's second birthday. Heather Kirksey sums up its evolution from inception to the present day and explains what progress has been made and where the project is going next. What is unique about OPNFV's approach to a complex and challenging technological and organisational problem is its determination to work both 'upstream' and 'midstream' by integrating components from other open source projects – which allows the wider open source community and ecosystem to conduct performance and use case-based testing on a wide range of NFV solutions. Heather Kirksey also discusses the 'Pharos'' community test-bed laboratory initiative which is predicated on fostering a federated NFV testing infrastructure of community labs around the world to host continuous integration, deployment and testing of the OPNFV platform. Meanwhile, the OPNFV recently published it's third platform release, and, continuing the organisation's 'rivers' theme, this one, after Arno and Brahmaputra, is OPNFV Colorado. The next platform release will no doubt be named after a river beginning with the letter 'D'. The Danube perhaps? Or the highly imaginatively named D River, in Oregon.

FILMED AT: OpenStack Summit 2016, Barcelona, Spain