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Open Network Operating System

Fresh Take

Article from ADMIN 35/2016

By Elisa Rojas

ONOS is an open source software-defined networking project that is developing into a serious competitor.

The Open Network Operating System (ONOS) [1] is a software-defined networking (SDN) platform that aims to open up proprietary, inflexible, and expensive network black boxes. A few high-priced providers have dominated this market for years. The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) [2], a nonprofit organization based in Menlo Park, California, provides the primary support for the ONOS project. It is currently working on version 1.7.0 (code-named Hummingbird), which will be the eighth release of ONOS.

The ONOS team includes various other participants, including service providers such as AT&T, China Unicom, and NTT Communications and vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, and Ericsson. The ONOS project has also been cooperating with the Linux Foundation [3] since October 2015. Together with OpenDaylight (ODL) [4], ONOS is one of two big beasts in the young SDN ecosystem, thanks to its constant development, up-to-date documentation, community support, and practical applications.

The project describes three main objectives on its website: attracting partners, producing high-quality SDN (network OS) software, and creating open source processes with which employees can work as productively as possible. The project hopes for significant added value from the cooperation of all those participating in the project, initially expressing itself in the form of the carefully authored wiki entries and a well-maintained mailing list, which stood in contrast to the patchy documentation of the ODL Project. In probable pursuit of these goals, ONOS significantly increased the number of its contributors within a few months. Perhaps in response, the ODL Project recently refined its documentation.

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