The future of networking: Open source networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.

Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open source networking is the “new norm,” with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. Dan Kohn who leads the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation cites cost savings, improved resilience and higher development velocity for both bug fixes and the rolling out of new features for this change. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at The Linux Foundation used the term “open-sourcification” in his keynote.

The conference drew both business and technical leaders focused on networking beyond software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) with deep technical tracks and opportunities for attendees to learn from peers across the industry.

Starting seven years ago, the Open Networking Summits unite the networking ecosystem, bringing key researchers, industry leaders, and technology pros together for some driving focus on how open networking is moving forward and their roles in making it work. The first conference was held at Stanford University in October 2011. This was the first Open Networking Summit to be held in Europe.

With more than 30 sponsors at last week’s conference — Intel, Huawei, Red Hat and Cloud Native Computing Foundation heading the list in the “diamond,” “platinum,” and “gold” categories, the diverse focus and industry participation highlighted an increasingly far-reaching array of networking efforts and accomplishments.

Conference focus

The key areas of focus of this networking event included cloud harmonization, open source and open standards, open networking, virtualization, containers, automation, cyber defense, AI, and compliance verification.

It’s not too late to benefit

While it’s obviously too late to attend the conference, it’s not too late to gain a lot of value from the presentations. Both keynotes and session slides have been posted online for your review.

The main conference keynote is available at the conference website, other keynotes are available at this YouTube page and session slides are available at this conference page.

Reviewing keynotes and presentations from the summit can give you a glimpse into where open source networking technologies are heading.