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AT&T Open Sources Its SDN Framework To The Linux Foundation (fiercetelecom.com)
An anonymous reader writes "It's no secret that AT&T has been planning to move to a software-defined network for quite a while. Now, they've decided to open-source the whole thing." From Fierce Telecom:
AT&T today announced it will release its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform to the wider telecom industry as an open source offering managed by the Linux Foundation. The goal, the company said, is to make ECOMP the telecom industry's standard automation platform for managing virtual network functions and other software-centric network capabilities.
AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code to the Linux Foundation on Wednesday, saying "We want to build a community -- where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform..." AT&T said Wednesday they've already received interest from other major telecoms, and "we want this to help align the global industry." While their ultimate goal is to virtualize 75% of their own network by 2020, at least one analyst sees a larger trend where the whole telecom industry collectively bypasses equipment vendors and begins "taking network innovation into its own hands."
AT&T delivered 8.5 million lines of code to the Linux Foundation on Wednesday, saying "We want to build a community -- where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform..." AT&T said Wednesday they've already received interest from other major telecoms, and "we want this to help align the global industry." While their ultimate goal is to virtualize 75% of their own network by 2020, at least one analyst sees a larger trend where the whole telecom industry collectively bypasses equipment vendors and begins "taking network innovation into its own hands."
That hasn't been true since the 1970s.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Kernel programmer here (though I barely qualify for the title).
The stock kernel includes all the basics of software-defined networking - bridging, firewalls, etc. Obviously that's just a small percentage of the kernel, less than 1% of the kernel's 15 million lines. Which means the kernel does basic SDN in no more than about 150,000 lines. Why AT&T needed to add 50 times as much is a legitimate question. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like many software projects, they used ten times as much code as needed for the job, resulting in ten times as many bugs.