Business Update: March 2020

March 31, 2020/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

Here at PANTHEON.tech, we are saddened by the current situation in the world, regarding the COVID-19 outbreak and are fully supporting everybody in the front-line of this fight.

As the world is continuously relying on stable networks and improvements in technology, our day-to-day business needs to continue as usual.

Firstly, we needed to asses the situation. That is, why we have put the following, responsible counter-measures in place, as of 13th of March, 2020:

Off-Site Work: We have put our staff on off-site work. Our employees were able to utilize off-site work as a benefit at PANTHEON.tech. This way, we were sure that most of our staff would be used to this change and quickly adapt to it.

Great Software: A stable & fast VPN is a must, as well as a stable conferencing software and an efficient alternative to e-mails.

Reliable Connection: We have renewed our ISO certificates through an online-meeting system on the 27th of March, 2020. This guarantees that all standards for remote-work are also being followed. This makes off-site work and staying in touch a breeze.

Business-as-usual: PANTHEON.tech is lucky enough to work in a field, where we have the option to effectively work off-site. Our business hours are the same and work continues, as it did before.

PANTHEON.tech is continuing to strive for perfection in its solutions. It doesn’t matter if it’s in our office space, or off-site. Because our employees do not need to travel to work, they spend more time working on their own.

We miss the direct contact with our colleagues and customers but appreciate the opportunity to continue in our work. We sincerely hope that the current situation will be resolved as quickly as possible. But until then, it is business-as-usual for us.

We encourage anybody with needs within custom open-source solutions, software prototyping or network technologies to contact us. We are happy to be of assistance and create new partnerships, even in these trying times.

Nothing is changing for PANTHEON.tech – in terms of quality & delivery. We always strive for perfection.

PANTHEON.tech

[OpenDaylight] Sodium: A Developers Perspective

March 30, 2020/in News, OpenDaylight /by PANTHEON.tech

by Robert Varga | Leave us your feedback on this post!

PANTHEON.tech continued to be the leader in terms of contributions to the OpenDaylight codebase. While our focus remained on the core platform, we also dabbled into individual plugins to deliver significant performance, scalability and correctness improvements. We are therefore glad to be a significant part of the effort that went into the newest release of OpenDaylight – Sodium.

In Sodium, we have successfully transitioned OpenDaylight codebase to require Java 11 – an effort we have been spearheading since the mid-Neon timeframe. This allows our users to not only reap the runtime improvements of Java 11 (which was possible to do with Sodium), but it allows OpenDaylight code to take advantage of features available in Java 11.

Our continued stewardship of YANG Tools has seen us deliver multiple improvements and new features, most notable of which are:

YANG Parser: has been extended to support Errata 5617 leaf-ref path expressions, which violate RFC7950, but are used by various models seen in the wild — such as ETSI NFV models. YANG parser has also received some improvements in areas of CPU and memory usage when faced with large models, ranging from 10 to 25%, depending on the models and features used.

In-memory Data Tree: the technology underlying most datastore implementations. It has been improved in multiple areas, yielding an overall memory footprint reduction of 30%. This allows better out-of-the-box scalability.

Adoption of Java 11: Java has allowed PANTHEON.tech to deploy improvements to MD-SAL Binding runtime, resulting in measurably faster dispatch of methods across the system, providing benefits to all OpenDaylight plugin code.

We have also continued improvements in the Distributed Datastore. We achieved further improvements to the persistence format, reducing in-memory & on-disk footprint by as much as 25%.

Last but not least, we have taken a hard look at the OVSDB project and provided major refactors of the codebase. This has immensely improved its ability to scale the number of connected devices, as well as individual connection throughput.

If you would like a custom OpenDaylight integration, feel free to contact us!

memif + T-REX: CNF Testing Made Easy

February 18, 2020/in CDNF.io, News /by PANTHEON.tech

PANTHEON.tech’s developer Július Milan has managed to integrate memif into the T-REX Traffic Generator. T-REX is a traffic generator, which you can use to test the speed of network devices. Now you can test Cloud-Native Functions, which support memif natively in the cloud, without specialized network cards!

Imagine a situation, where multiple cloud-native functions are interconnected or chained via memif. Tracking their utilization would be a nightmare. With our memif + T-REX solution, you can make arbitrary measurements – effortlessly and straightforward. The results will be more precise and direct, as opposed to creating adapters and interconnecting them, in order to be able to measure traffic.

Our commitment to open-source has a long track record. With lighty-core being open-sourced and our CTO Robert Varga being the top-single contributor to OpenDaylight source code, we are proving once again that our heart belongs to the open-source community.

The combination of memif & T-REX makes measuring cloud-native function performance easy & straightforward.

memif, the “shared memory packet interface”, allows for any client (VPP, libmemif) to communicate with DPDK using shared memory. Our solution makes memif highly efficient, with zero-copy capability. This saves memory bandwidth and CPU cycles while adding another piece to the puzzle for achieving a high-performance CNF.

It is important to note, that zero-copy works on the newest version of DPDK. However, memif & T-REX can be used in zero-copy mode, when the T-REX side of the pair is the master. The other side of the memif pair (VPP or some cloud-native function) is the zero-copy slave.

T-REX, developed by Cisco, solves the issue of buying stateful/realistic traffic generators, which can set your company back by up to 500 000$. This limits the testing capabilities and slows down the entire process. T-REX solves this by being an accessible, open-source, stateful/stateless traffic generator, fueled by DPDK.

Services that function in the cloud are characterized by an unlimited presence. They are accessed from anywhere, with a functional connection and are located on remote servers. This may curb costs since you do not have to create and maintain your servers in a dedicated, physical space.

PANTHEON.tech is proud to be a technology enabler, with continuous support for open-source initiatives, communities & solutions.

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

[What Is] Cloud-Native and its future

November 15, 2019/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

The methodology of cloud-native enables applications, as we know them, to function in a cloud environment and utilize it to the fullest. But what does the cloud offer, that wasn’t here before?

Forecast: Cloudy

Services that function in the cloud are characterized by an unlimited presence – they are accessed from anywhere, with a functional connection and are located on remote servers. This can curb costs, as you do not have to create and maintain your servers in a dedicated, physical space. If you do, even more costs can arise from the expertise needed to be built within your company to support such a solution.

Cloud-native apps are designed from the ground-up to be present in the cloud and use its potential to the fullest.

Apps re-imagined

The cloud-native approach breaks down apps into microservices. One app contains a set of services, which are independent of each other – one failure does not break the entire app. If paired with service standards like Kubernetes, containers can automatically heal failures once they occur. Furthermore, cloud-native apps can use a variety of languages to build each service. This is possible due to the specified independence of each service. There is a clear separation by API

Apps are packed into containers. Containers guarantee, that all components which are needed for the application in these container images are present and ready to be immediately deployed within a container runtime. Since these containers or blocks, function as one, users can utilize horizontal scaling capabilities, based on actual demands.

Since services are split-up and independent of each other, cloud-native apps can apply a continuous delivery approach. Here, different teams can collaborate on different parts of the container, and manage a continuous development, independent development and improvement of services in the container without redeploying the whole environment.

Industry shift towards clouds

It is hard to move on from an approach, which has proven itself over the years and became a standard. However, the cloud-native approach can offer unmatched scalability & agility for the end-user, unlike traditional applications.

Integration is made easier due to the enormous involvement of the open-source community, namely the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This foundation covers most of the major projects present in common cloud architectures, including Kubernetes.

If your company is looking forward to adapting to these changes, stay tuned for what PANTHEON.tech can offer on this front.

lighty.io is Cloud-Native Ready, are you?

October 14, 2019/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

lighty.io, at its core, manages network devices in a virtualized network. It is therefore crucial, that it works as a robust, and at the same time, stable tool. When deployed in modern networks, lighty.io itself can not guarantee stability and an error-free network.

PANTHEON.tech engineers have managed to extend OpenDayligh/lighty.io capabilities with Akka Cluster. This fulfills requirements for dynamic, horizontal scaling of lighty.io applications.

Welcome, lighty.io, to the world of cloud-native & micro-services.

lighty.io & containers

Thanks to lighty.io removing Karaf and using Java SE as its run-time, we have made it one of the most lightweight SDN controllers in the world. This makes not only lighty.io‘s but OpenDaylight’s components usable in the world of containers & micro-services.

We have further managed to include horizontal scaling in lighty.io and are proud to announce, that auto-scaling, up & down functionality in lighty.io Akka Cluster is available.

Akka

Akka is a set of open-source libraries, which allow for designing scalable, resilient systems and micro-services. Its strongest points are:

Multi-threaded behavior
Transparency: in regards to communication between components and systems using them
Clustered architecture: for designing a scalable, on-demand and reactive system

This means, that Akka addresses common situations in any virtualized architecture – components failing without responding, messages getting lost in transit and fluctuating network latency. The key to fully utilizing Akka is combining devices into clusters.

Cluster

As we mentioned earlier, networks can experience down-time. This may be due to the collapse of one machine, and this breaking the entire chain of events. Running applications as clusters, instead of single instances, avoid this situation.

Imagine, grouping objects with a similar purpose together as Clustering. If one of the cluster members fails, another member can come to the rescue and continue in its function. This happens in an instance – the end-user doesn’t even notice that anything happened.

Requests are evenly distributed across the cluster members, thanks to load-balancing. One device won’t be overloaded with requests, as these are shared within the cluster.

If the amount of connected devices is low, the cluster will decrease in size and use fewer resources. The cluster adapts to the needs of the network and can increase or decrease in size. Due to this balance, hardware efficiency is guaranteed.

Clusters can, in some cases, fail, but potentially do not require manual intervention. If used with tools like Kubernetes, potential outages in the cluster are automatically healed. This can be a lifesaver in critical situations.

Linux Foundation

PANTHEON.tech @ Open Networking Summit Europe ’19

September 30, 2019/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

Here at PANTHEON.tech, we are proud to be a corporate member of the Linux Foundation and one of the sponsors of this the Open Networking Summit Europe 2019.

We were in attendance for this year’s Open Networking Summit Europe in Belgium, Antwerp. The organization was, as always, handled by the Linux Foundation Networking.

As is tradition, we were participating, networking and presenting our know-how to potential business-partners & like-minded open-source enthusiasts.

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Belgium Meets Open-Source

The conference was held in Antwerp, Belgium, right next to the Antwerp Zoo. The Flanders Meeting & Convention Center does continue in the animal theme of the surroundings and contains halls filled with whale skeletons, historical zoo photos & other themed objects. It was a wonderful, spacious place, ideal for a conference of this size. We were also more than pleased, that so many attendees wore lanyards with our logo.

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Part of our booth at ONS was a presentation of two demos:

CNF Designer: Design and visualize your CNFs and export the settings. In this demo, people used PANTHEON.tech instances of NAT44, DHCP, Ligato and ACL CNFs.
Raspberry Pi Access Point: We have managed to run a VPP instance on a Raspberry Pi acting as a WIFI access point, send flow data using IPFIX to Elastiflow, and visualize it in Kibana

Orange x PANTHEON.tech

PANTHEON.tech developer Samuel Kontriš was busy at a demo-stand, in cooperation with Orange, named “TransportPCE: SDN Controller & Simulators for WDM Optical Networks (OpenDaylight, FD.io, Open ROADM, lighty.io)“. TransportPCE supports both the original ODL Karaf (OSGi) and lighty.io build (without any proprietary component). We had the chance to present why lighty.io should be the right choice for your SDN controller.

It was a great opportunity to show why lighty.io deserves attention. Many people have come to ask about lighty.io and afterwards, I gladly referred them further to our PANTHEON.tech booth staff.

TransportPCE is an open-source implementation of an optical SDN controller, officially integrated into OpenDaylight Fluorine and Neon releases.

Edge Computation Offloading by PANTHEON.tech

We continued with a session/talk, lead by PANTHEON.tech VP of Engineering Miroslav Mikluš, called “Edge Computation Offloading”. Its premise was the promise of 5G and the high expectations it has set up. In his talk, he showed how Radio Access Network could be used to offload tasks from the end-user device to the edge.

We have shown a demo of a client application (running on an Android mobile device), that can execute compute-intensive tasks on an edge compute node. K8s has been used on a RAN site to host specialized container application, based on TensorFlow. It had received pre-trained models to classify image content.

Miroslav Mikluš - ONS Session

As always, we appreciate the organizational skills of the Linux Foundation and would like to thank LFN, Orange and our colleagues who participated at this year’s Open Networking Summit in Antwerp.

We are proud to be working on several open-source projects, centered not only around the Linux Foundation Networking. PANTHEON.tech is looking forward to overcoming all challenges, which will ultimately contribute to the open-source community and possibly, change networking forever.

[Announcement] PANTHEON.tech @ ONS EU 2019!

September 2, 2019/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

PANTHEON.tech will be attending this years Open Network Summit Europe in Belgium, Antwerp. We are looking forward to this event, organized by the Linux Foundation Networking & Linux Network Foundation.

As is tradition, we will be participating, networking and presenting a variety of projects, ideas, and our skills to potential business-partners & like-minded open-source enthusiasts.

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You will be able to meet with:

COO Štefan Kobza
VP of Engineering Miroslav Mikuš
Technical Business Development Manager Martin Varga
Software Engineer Samuel Kontriš
Technical Copywriter Filip Čúzy

Come talk to us @ Booth B8

Our demo with Orange

This year, we will be presenting a demo (as part of the LF Networking Demo section), in a partnership with Orange. The presentation itself is named:

TransportPCE: SDN Controller & Simulators for WDM Optical Networks (OpenDaylight, FD.io, Open ROADM, lighty.io)

TransportPCE is an open-source implementation of an optical SDN controller officially integrated into OpenDaylight Fluorine and Neon releases. It allows managing optical WDM devices, compliant with the Open ROADM specifications, the current only open standard that focuses on WDM devices full interoperability.

Along with the controller implementation, TransportPCE also embeds a device simulator, derived from the FD.io project honeycomb. A full functional test suite was built on top of this simulator for CI/CD sake. The demo will simulate a small WDM network topology with FD.io honeycomb and shows how to create and delete a WDM service with the TransportPCE test suite. The design of TransportPCE relies on a modular approach that leverages the classical OSGi OpenDaylight framework.

This design allows considering more deployment scenarios than the monolithic WDM network management systems classically found on commercial products. lighty.io is an alternative framework to OSGI for OpenDaylight, that is developed by PANTHEON.tech and is partially open-sourced. It is thought for deployment scenarios, that require streamlined applications with minimalistic resource consumption (e.g. microservices).

TransportPCE supports both OSGi and lighty.io (without any proprietary component). The demo will propose a comparison of OSGi and lighty.io.

Who is PANTHEON.tech?

PANTHEON.tech is a software research & development company, located in Bratislava, Slovakia. Our focus lies on network technologies and the development of software, with over 17 years of experience.

We were part of developing OpenDaylight components: MD-SAL, YANG Tools, Clustering, NETCONF, RESTCONF, SNMP, OpenFlow, BGP & PCEP. We look forward to helping speed up the development of open-source networking technology & participating in the SDN revolution.

[News] all-lighty.io Summer 2019

August 16, 2019/in News, SDN /by PANTHEON.tech

It has been a busy summer for PANTHEON.tech & our developers of our leading product lighty.io. For all those interested in new information, here is a round-up of all the examples and demos we have published on our social media.

Integrating lighty.io & CCSDK (ONAP)

In the last weeks, we are intensively working, together with the wonderful ONAP community, on proposing to remove existing dependencies on the OSGi Framework and Karaf from the CCSDK project – while still maintaining the same OpenDaylight services, which the community knows and uses. We will deep-dive on our proposal soon in a separate post, so stay tuned!

Spring Boot Example

Full NETCONF/RESTCONF stack for the Spring Boot runtime.

We have recently succeeded in running RESTCONF in a Springboot example, designed for lighty. Springboot is now able to run in a full OpenDaylight/lighty.io stack.

Spring Boot makes it easy to just run & create stand-alone, Spring-based Applications. It boasts no code generation or requirement for XML configuration, automatic configuration of Spring functionality and radically improves the pure Spring deployment and development.

Clustered Application Demo

lighty.io running as a clustered RESTCONF/NETCONF SDN controller application. From now on, it supports deployment in Akka cluster, so you are not limited to single-node SDN controllers.

Furthermore, you can deploy lighty.io as a Kubernetes cluster.

TransportPCE Controller

lighty.io TransportPCE Controller is now upstreamed in the OpenDaylight Project! We have previously managed to migrate TransportPCE into lighty. Now, you can see the code for yourself in the OpenDaylight repository.

We have previously published a how-to on how to migrate the OpenDaylight TransportPCE to lighty.io.

BGP/EVPN Router

We are planning on extending the BGP function of an SDN controller with an EVPN extension in the BGP control-plane. We will discuss BGP-EVPN functions in SDN controllers and how the lighty.io BGP function can replace existing legacy BGP route reflectors, running in service provider’s WAN or DC networks.

Match Made In Heaven: Spring Boot & lighty.io

August 16, 2019/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

lighty.io brings you full NETCONF/RESTCONF stack for the Spring Boot runtime.

Check out our example, which runs core OpenDaylight components integrated into a Springboot application.

You are no longer restricted to the cumbersome legacy ODL Karaf runtime. lighty.io makes accessible spring component ecosystem for wide SDN development. Go ahead and enjoy features of ODL ecosystem and advantages of the vast spring project ecosystem.

Popular Java Framework

We have recently succeeded in running RESTCONF in a Springboot example, available for lighty.io. Springboot is now able to run in a full OpenDaylight/lighty.io stack, this includes:

RESTCONF
MD-SAL
NETCONF

Spring Boot makes it easy to just run & create stand-alone, Spring-based Applications. It boasts no code generation or requirement for XML configuration, automatic configuration of Spring functionality and radically improves the pure Spring deployment and development.

MD-SAL, part of the OpenDaylight Controller, provides infrastructure services for data stores, RPC (& Service Routing) and notification subscriptions, as well as publish services.

Model-Driven SAL Queries is a tool developed by PANTHEON.tech, aimed at OpenDaylight developers. Its goal is to speed up work with the MD-SAL API. On top of this, we added two new features: query operations on a data store. Check out our introductory video on this project:

RESTCONF is a REST-like protocol running over HTTP. It helps to access data defined in YANG, for which it uses datastores defined in NETCONF. Its aim is to provide a simple interface with REST-like features and principles, with device abstraction based on available resources.

NETCONF, on the other hand, is a network management protocol, developed and maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force. It is able to manage (install, delete, manipulate) network device configurations. All of these processes are done on top of an RPC layer.

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

[Comparison] OpenDaylight Neon SR1 vs. SR2

July 16, 2019/in News, OpenDaylight /by PANTHEON.tech

The development of OpenDaylight Sodium is already producing significant improvements, some of which are finding their way to the upcoming Service Release of Neon.

These are the test results for OpenDaylight Neon SR2. We have recorded significant improvements in the following areas:

Datastore snapshot-size: ~49% reduction
Processing time: ~58% reduction
In-memory size: ~25% reduction
Object count: ~25% reduction
NodeIdentifier: ~99.9% reduction
AugmentationIdentifier: ~99.9% reduction

These enhancements will also be present in the future, long-awaited release of Sodium.

Our commitment – more commits

PANTHEON.tech’s CTO, Robert Varga, is currently the top-single committer to OpenDaylights source-code, according to recent reports. PANTHEON.tech also resides as the number 1 contributor to its source-code.

Bitergia, a software development analytics company, regularly tracks the number of commits to OpenDaylight – based on single commiters and companies. OpenDaylight plays a significant role in PANTHEON.tech’s offerings and solutions.

Apart from PANTHEON.tech’s position as a top contributing organization to ODL, PANTHEON.tech has always been a strong supporter of the open-source community. This support covers a wide range of developers from local, private open-source development groups to international open-source platforms – such as ONAP, OPNFV or FD.io.

What is OpenDaylight?

OpenDaylight is a collaborative, open-source project, established in 2013. It aims to speed up the adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization.

It was founded by global industry leaders, such as Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, IBM, Dell, HP, Red Hat, Microsoft, PANTHEON.tech and open to all.

PANTHEON.tech’s involvement in OpenDaylight goes way back to its beginnings. We have led the way in what an SDN controller is and should aspire to be. This requires dedication, which was proven over the years with an extensive amount of contribution and a successful track record, thanks to our expert developers.

Contact us, if you are interested in our solutions, which are based on, or integrate OpenDaylights framework.

[Release] OpenDaylight Sodium, YANG Tools & MD-SAL

May 24, 2019/in News, OpenDaylight /by PANTHEON.tech

It is no secret, that OpenDaylight is more than a passion project here at PANTHEON.tech. As one of the staples in the SDN revolution, we are also proud that we are one of the largest contributors to the project, with our PANTHEON.tech Fellow Robert Varga leading in the number of individual commits. Let us have a look at what is new.

YANG Tools 3.0.0

YANG Tools is a set of libraries and data modeling language, used to model state & configuration data. It’s libraries provide support for NETCONF and YANG for Java-based projects and applications. What’s new in the world of the latest Yangtools release?

It implements new RFCs: RFC7952 (Defining and Using Metadata with YANG) and RFC8528 (YANG Schema Mount).

YANG parser now supports RFC6241 & RFC8528, while adding strict QName rules for “node identifiers”.

JDK11 support has been added together with lots of small bugfixes, which you can read in detail in its changelog.

MD-SAL 4.0.0

The Model-Driven Service Abstraction Layer is OpenDaylight’s kernel – it interfaces between different layers and modules. MD-SAL uses APIs to connect & bind requests and services and delegates certain types of requests.

The new version of MD-SAL has been released for ODL. MD-SAL is one of the central OpenDaylight components. This release contains mainly bugfixes and brings pre-packaged model updates for newly released IETF models: RFC8519, RFC8528, RFC8529, RFC8530.

Get ready for OpenDaylight Sodium

OpenDaylights development has a new important milestone ahead: the Sodium release, currently scheduled around September 2019. This release will bring new versions of YANG Tools, MD-SAL and other core OpenDaylight components.

JDK11, as well as JKD8, is supported, providing an opportunity for OpenDaylight users to try new features of JDK11. It bids farewell to Java EE modules & JavaFX, as well as performance & bug fixes.

We believe you are also looking forward to these releases and encourage you to try them out!

Don’t forget to contact us, in case you are interested in a commercial solution for your business!

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

[Release] VPPTop

May 6, 2019/in News, VPP /by PANTHEON.tech

Here at PANTHEON.tech, we really enjoy perfecting the user experience around VPP and creating projects based around this framework. That is why we have developed a handy tool, which lets you analyze several crucial data points while using VPP. We call it VPPTop.

Requirements

In order to run VPPTop, you will need to install these dependencies first:

[Go] version 1.11+
[VPP], version 19.04-3~g1cb333cdf~b41 is recommended. You can find the installation guide here.
Configure VPP, according to the README file

How to install & run

1. Follow the above requirements, in order to have all dependencies for this software installed

2. Make sure VPP is running beforehand

3. Install VPPTop via Terminal to $GOPATH/bin:

go get -u github.com/PantheonTechnologies/vpptop

4. Run the tool from Terminal:

sudo -E vpptop

What is VPPTop?

VPPTop is an application for sysadmins and testers, implemented in Go. The goal of VPPTop is to provide VPP statistics which are updated in real-time, in one terminal window.

Before the release of our tool, admins could only rely on the usage of a CLI, to first request the data flow and then receive information, which are not up-to-date, nor in real-time.

Now, you can use our VPPTop tool, to find up-to-date information on your framework!

Version 1.11 supports statistics for:

Interfaces
Nodes
Errors
Memory Usage per Thread
Per Thread-Data

Version 1.11 supports these functionalities:

Clearing counters
Filter by Name
Sorting

Why should you start to use Vector Package Processing?

The main advantages are:

high performance with a proven technology
production level quality
flexible and extensible

The main advantage of VPP is, that you can plug in a new graph node, adapt it to your networks purposes and run it right away. Including a new plugin does not mean, you need to change your core-code with each new addition. Plugins can be either included in the processing graph, or they can be built outside the source tree and become an individual component in your build.

Furthermore, this separation of plugins makes crashes a matter of a simple process restart, which does not require your whole build to be restarted because of one plugin failure.

You can read more in our PANTHEON.tech series on VPP.

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

PANTHEON.tech joins the Telecom Infra Project

January 31, 2019/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

In January 2019, PANTHEON.tech has become a member of the Telecom Infra Project community – a collaborative telecom community.

The Telecom Infra Project is a network of companies which aim to share, create and collaborate on innovative technologies in the field of telecommunication. Its members comprise a variety of operators, technology providers, developers, startups and other institutions, outside of telecommunication services. It was launched in February 2016, with the aim of accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry.

How it works

The Telecom Infra Project has a structure, in which its members can actively contribute and share their expertise in the wide range of telecom technologies:

Project groups design and build technologies. They are divided into three network areas, that altogether create an end-to-end network: Access – Backhaul – Core and Management.

Community Labs test and validate the technologies from Project Groups in field and production trials. There are 6 active TIP Community Labs from all around the world, which share their testing results and respond to the members outputs.

Ecosystem Acceleration Centers aim to build a dedicated space with venture capital funding and experienced advisors, in order to help upcoming and promising telecom startups bring their ideas to the market and consumers.

PANTHEON.tech is proud to be part of the driving force in telecommunication innovation.We believe that we will prove ourselves worthy of this membership with our expertise in SDN, NFV or open-source solutions.

We are looking forward to cooperating with other TIP members on improving and creating technologies.

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub. Follow us on Twitter.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

PANTHEON.tech adds OC4VPP code to Sweetcomb

January 16, 2019/in News, VPP /by PANTHEON.tech

Recently, PANTHEON.tech has decided to contribute to FD.io’s Sweetcomb project source-code. This was mainly due to the fact, that our new project OC4VPP would compliment the idea and possibilities of the project, while improving its functionality.

What was the OC4VPP project?

Network administrators have the possibility to use protocols, such as gNMI or NETCONF, in order to communicate with sysrepo.

OC4VPP was a sysrepo plugin, with which we were able to setup and orchestrate the VPP framework. This plugin was part of our in-house solution that we were working on.

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Sweetcomb and OC4VPP both use VAPI, in order to communicate with the VPP API. Here at PANTHEON.tech, our developers managed to include more YANG models into OC4VPP. But we realized soon, that Sweetcomb was in advanced development and provided some of the functionality, we wanted to work on.

How will Sweetcomb benefit from OC4VPP?

Sweetcomb is a management agent, used to expose YANG modules, with the help of RESTCONF and NETCONF, in order to immediately allow management of the VPP instance. It translates all communication between the Northbound interface and the VPP API.

We believe, that Sweetcomb will directly benefit from PANTHEON.tech’s solution, in form of the source-code of OC4VPP. This will provide the project with more YANG models to expand its functionality.

Due to Sweetcomb being a new project and mainly proof of concept, it currently supports only these 5 IETF-YANG models:

/ietf-interfaces:interfaces/interface
/ietf-interfaces:interfaces/interface/enabled
/ietf-interfaces:interfaces/interface/ietf-ip:ipv4/address
/ietf-interfaces:interfaces/interface/ietf-ip:ipv6/address
/ietf-interfaces:interfaces-state

First of all, Sweetcomb will gain support for OpenConfig models, which expands its usability and improves the projects deployment scale.

In case of OC4VPP, we managed to include 10 additional YANG models we would like to implement into the actual list of supported modules in Sweetcomb:

/openconfig-interfaces:interfaces/interface/config
/openconfig-interfaces:interfaces/interface/state
/openconfig-interfaces:interfaces/interface/subinterfaces/subinterface/state
/openconfig-interfaces:interfaces/interface/subinterfaces/subinterface/openconfig-if-ip:ipv4/openconfig-if-ip:addresses/openconfig-if-ip:address/openconfig-if-ip:config
/openconfig-interfaces:interfaces/interface/subinterfaces/subinterface/openconfig-if-ip:ipv4/openconfig-if-ip:addresses/openconfig-if-ip:address/openconfig-if-ip:state
/openconfig-local-routing:local-routes/static-routes/static/next-hops/next-hop/config
/openconfig-local-routing:local-routes/static-routes/static/next-hops/next-hop/interface-ref/config
/openconfig-local-routing:local-routes/static-routes/static/state
/openconfig-local-routing:local-routes/static-routes/static/next-hops/next-hop/state
/openconfig-local-routing:local-routes/static-routes/static/next-hops/next-hop/interface-ref/state

As a regular open-source contributor and supporter, we are glad that we were able to make this important decision and showcase crucial principles of open-source development:

Communication – Participation – Collaboration

You can find the source-code for Sweetcomb in the official GitHub.

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub. Follow us on Twitter.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

PANTHEON.tech is the 2nd largest OpenDaylight contributor for Q3/2018

December 12, 2018/in News, OpenDaylight /by PANTHEON.tech

In the last week of November 2018, Bitergia, a software development analytics company, published a report on the past and current status of the OpenDaylight project, which plays a significant role in PANTHEON.tech’s offerings and solutions.

PANTHEON.tech’s CTO Robert Varga, is leading the list of per-user-contributions to the source code of OpenDaylight, with over 980 commits to the source code in Q3 of 2018. This achievement further establishes PANTHEON.tech’s position as one of the largest contributors to the OpenDaylight project.

As for the list of companies which contribute to the source code of OpenDaylight, PANTHEON.tech is the 2nd largest contributor for Q3/2018, with 1034 commits. We were just 34 commits shy of the top contributor position, which belongs to Red Hat.

Due to ODL’s open-source nature, anyone can contribute to the project and improve it in the long-run. Any change that gets added to the source code is defined as a commit. These types of changes need an approval and can not be any type of automated activity – including bot-actions or merges. This means, that each single commit is a unique change, added to the source code.

PANTHEON.tech will continue its commitment to improving OpenDaylight and we are looking forward to being a part of the future of this project.

What is OpenDaylight?

ODL is a collaborative open source project aimed to speed up the adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

PANTHEON.tech’s nurture for ODL goes back when it was forming. In a sense, PANTHEON.tech has led the way is and how an SDN controller is and should be. This requires dedication, which was proven over the years with the extensive amount of contribution thanks to its expert developers.

Click here if you are interested in our solutions, which are based on, or integrate ODL’s framework.

You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub.

Watch our YouTube Channel.

PANTHEON.tech @ OTKD – 345 km in 33,5 hours.

October 2, 2018/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

PANTHEON.tech’s running team participated in the From Tatry To Danube Run (OTKD) 2018.

image2018 9 20 8 29 4

The relay run named From Tatry To Danube (OTKD) is 345 kilometers long run and may comprise a maximum of 12 runners per team. This year, 214 teams had taken part. PANTHEON.tech running team took part in this adventure with our 12 runners who had to cover 345 kilometers in less than 36 hours. We are proud that our colleagues were successful. The running team finished the run in the overall 33 hours 34 minutes.

otkd pt team photo

The run took place from Saturday, August 18 to Sunday, August 19. The runners started on Saturday morning in Demenovská valley and ran non-stop. Day and night, in harsh weather and terrain, to reach the finish in Bratislava on the bank of Danube river. Each of the runners covered approximately 30 kilometers in average.

PANTHEON.tech believes, a healthy mind can only cherish on a healthy body is happy to support its employees in participating in such activities. See you at OTKD 2019!

Meet Martin Varga – PANTHEON.tech @ ONS 2018

September 21, 2018/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

martin

Martin Varga represents PANTHEON.tech as the Technical Business Development Manager and is responsible for the growth of the company’s business portfolio and goal to establish new partnerships. Martin has over two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales management, and international business development fields.

He has acquired many titles in his long career, ranging from Artist Manager to COO. He is an excellent negotiator and peoples person.

Recently, Martin had started to be very interested in the Hi tech business, especially in the networking field, which is on the rise nowadays and will be for the next decades. He quickly got absorbed in the networking field and discovered his new passion. Hence he accepted the challenge and is using all his previously acquired experience to expand the business development for PANTHEON.tech.

Connect with Martin via his LinkedIn.

Martin will be available to establish new business relationships with international partners and to discover new market share. He will be representing PANTHEON.tech the silver sponsor of Open Networking Summit Europe which will take place on Sep 25-27 in Amsterdam.

Join Martin at PANTHEON.tech’s booth #14 in the event possibly to shake hands into a partnership which will last.

Meet Robert Varga – PANTHEON.tech @ ONS 2018

September 19, 2018/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

Robert Varga is a PANTHEON.tech Fellow, who has almost two decades of Information Technology Industry experience ranging from being a C code monkey, through various roles in telecommunications’ IT operations to architecting bleeding edge software platforms.

Robert has a deep expertise in Software Defined Networking, its applications and the OpenDaylight platform.

Within those decades, some of the technologies he had experience are: C/C++, Java, Python, various UNIX-like systems and database systems.

Robert has a very strong background in design, development, deployment, and administration of large-scale platforms with the primary focus on high availability and security.

Robert has been involved in OpenDaylight from its start, architecting, designing and implementing the MD-SAL. He is the most prolific OpenDaylight contributor and a member of the OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee, representing kernel projects. His code contributions revolve around key infrastructure components, such as YANG Tools, MD-SAL and Clustered Data Store. He also designed and implemented the first versions of the BGP and PCEP plugins.

Source: Bitergia Analytics

Until today, Robert Varga had made 11,368 commits in 66 ODL projects over the course of ODL’s lifespan. That is 621,236 added and 524,842 removed lines of code and that translates roughly around 12 great novels written in </code>. ODL continues to be a great example of what an open-source software is and how international contributors can collaborate beautifully to create the next great thing. There are currently only 13 TCLs in ODL who help steer the project forward and lead the ODL to be the most successful SDN controller in the world. He is proudly one of the ODL Technical Steering Committee Members and a committer to a range of projects.

The all-time top contributor of ODL Robert Varga, Chief Technology Officer of PANTHEON.tech makes the company proud to be among the top contributor of such innovative, successful project.

Robert shares the PANTHEON.tech’s ambition to create the biggest and most successful open-source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller in the world.

Robert will be available to share his deep expertise in the field and representing PANTHEON.tech the silver sponsor of Open Networking Summit Europe which will take place on Sep 25-27 in Amsterdam.

Join Robert at PANTHEON.tech’s booth #14 in the event to get a glimpse of the Software Defined Networking future.

lighty.io @ Open Network Summit 2018

September 17, 2018/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

PANTHEON.tech, the proven supporter of open-source software and its communities, leader in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the OpenDaylight (ODL) platform, has announced the development of lighty.io at the Open Networking Summit, USA.

Since then PANTHEON.tech’s initiative had received a great positive feedback. We got to know how lighty.io eased their SDN controller development pain and shortened the development time. Or how the removal of Apache Karaf enabled them to shorten product to market time and how the improved RESTCONF NB interface helped them spend time on their applications instead of solving technical debts.

Today, we to push forward the open-source community projects and its commercial applications developed on open-source software, especially the lighty.io core.

PANTHEON.tech will be again attending another summit on 25-27 September.

Find PANTHEON.tech, the Silver sponsor of the Open Networking Summit Europe, at the booth #14.

Stay tuned and watch this space for the other great announcements around lighty.io which will take space in the event.

Meet Štefan Kobza – PANTHEON.tech @ ONS 2018

September 14, 2018/in News /by PANTHEON.tech

Štefan Kobza is Chief Operation Officer at PANTHEON.tech with almost two decades of professional Information Technology industry experience.

He started his career as a software developer and built his way up. Štefan has worked on different projects ranging from developing proprietary code for major networking vendors to rating and billing services mainly in computer networking and telecommunication industries. All of his coding experiences helped Štefan to understand his game and stay on top of the projects he is involved and for PANTHEON.tech’s current customers to provide the highest quality engineering services.

Štefan has taken part in the process of defining some IETF RFCs ¹ ², which was an experience on its own.

Lately, he had developed a special interest for open-sourced projects and its communities.

Understanding the daily life of a software developer, Štefan helps in building an ever growing and ever improving environment that helps PANTHEON.tech provide the highest quality engineering services.

You can find his published articles and activities on his LinkedIn profile.

Besides leading day-to-day business in PANTHEON.tech, Štefan also watches closely the development around OpenDaylight, OPNFV, ONAP, FD.IO, Sysrepo, Contiv, Ligato, and others.

Find Štefan representing PANTHEON.tech the silver sponsor, at booth #14 in the Open Networking Summit Europe to exchange ideas and to get a glimpse of the Software Defined Networking future.

Save the date and get your tickets. #ons2018, Amsterdam Sep 25-27