Juniper moves OpenContrail’s codebase to Linux Foundation, advances cloud approach

Juniper Networks plans to move the codebase for its OpenContrail open-source network virtualization platform for the cloud to the Linux Foundation, broadening its efforts to drive more software innovations into the broader IT and service provider community.

The vendor is hardly a novice in developing open source platforms. In 2013, Juniper released its Contrail products as open sourced and built a user and developer community around the project. To drive its next growth phase, Juniper expanded the project’s governance, creating an even more open, community-led effort.

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As a scalable network virtualization control plane, OpenContrail provides both feature-rich SDN and strong security. OpenContrail has been deployed by various organizations, including cloud providers, telecom operators and enterprises, to simplify operational complexities and automate workload management across diverse cloud environments, including multicloud.

Juniper said that open source and open standards touted by the Linux Foundation fosters greater innovation and the vendor has carried out this work to support a variety of open source communities.

“Our goal of placing OpenContrail’s codebase with the Linux Foundation shows Juniper’s commitment to open networking and open source overall,” said Randy Bias, vice president of technology – cloud software at Juniper Networks, in a release. “Over the past year, we have been working closely with the community to transition the governance for OpenContrail’s codebase because we believe it has the unique opportunity to be a ubiquitous cloud-grade network fabric used everywhere.”

The vendor is hardly alone in driving more virtualization platforms into the open source community. AT&T contributed ECOMP to the open source community to become ONAP earlier this year, for example. It’s likely more innovations from vendors and providers will be contributed throughout the rest of 2017 and next year.