Solution Brief: Cross Community Continuous Integration (XCI) Empowers Innovation by Increasing Collaboration Between OPNFV and Upstream Communities

A survey of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in 2017 indicates that 80% of those surveyed feel that the DevOps software development model (DevOps) is essential or important to NFV success. The top DevOps engagement activities were evaluating DevOps toolchains, and automating and testing infrastructure. DevOps from the OPNFV perspective means a cultural and mindset change where development, release, and operations teams work together in concert by applying CI/ CD principles, automation, and practices to develop, test, deploy and monitor software systems.

The OPNFV project has embraced the DevOps development model by building a sophisticated continuous integration (CI) pipeline. Before XCI, OPNFV had only been integrating the latest major release of upstream projects such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, FD.io and others. Major releases of these projects can be on a multi-month cadence, for instance six months. Waiting this long for integration is sub-optimal since it delays how quickly OPNFV community members can access the latest upstream innovations; and it also delays how quickly upstream communities can get valuable feedback from OPNFV testing.

The OPNFV XCI initiative solves this problem by regular integration and testing of the latest software versions from several upstream projects. In this solution brief, learn how XCI addresses complex testing challenges and slashes the time to implement new features and address bugs from months to days.