GEN15 to feature industry’s first LSO Hackathon at Texas

NEW DELHI: Under the leadership of MEF, the industry’s first Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Hackathon will be organized at the global GEN15 conference, which is to be held between November 16 and 19, 2015 at the Omni Hotel in Dallas, Texas.

Supported by Cisco DevNet, the LSO Hackathon will bring together Open Source community developers and Carrier Ethernet services networking experts to collaborate and develop solutions based on MEF specifications in order to accelerate the implementation of agile, assured and orchestrated Third Network services.

Commenting about the forthcoming event, Dave Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems, said, “User experience, infinite bandwidth, and on-demand service delivery have come to dominate what we perceive as the Internet. The software agile development model has created this sharp knee in the rate of innovation over the past couple of years. This innovation needs standardization and open sourcing, and the MEF’s LSO Hackathon is an important contribution to the shift of this part of the SDO ecosystem towards strengthening standards in a fast and adaptable way. This is part of a trend that Cisco is proud to be encouraging and actively supporting.”

“The MEF takes collaboration with other SDOs very seriously, as evidenced by our new UNITE program that we started in mid-2014,” stated Nan Chen, President of the MEF. “What the LSO Hackathon does is take that collaboration to a new level, superseding reliance on the formal, but slower, liaison process by introducing new software-oriented approaches to accelerating standardized interoperability. We believe that the MEF LSO Hackathon also is going to help break down informal silos within our member organizations by encouraging hands-on, cross-departmental hackathon teams.”

LSO Hackathon Objectives

The organizers have outlined the key objectives of the first LSO Hackathon. The objective would be to develop and implement:

• Application Program Interfaces (APIs) based on the emerging LSO Presto API framework
• OpenDaylight SDN controller plugins to support LSO Presto APIs
• LSO orchestration solutions, including a prototype LSO Orchestrator with a GUI that is oriented around CE 2.0 service orchestration.

These first LSO Hackathon objectives are based on the contributions and projects being led by Cablelabs and CenturyLink, who are two very active participants in the MEF.

Hackathon Schedule

The LSO Hackathon will take place during November 16-18, 2015 alongside the main GEN15 conference.

• Monday, November 16, 2015: Preparatory workshop
• Tuesday, November 17, 2015 and Wednesday, November 18, 2015: Coding and collaboration

Hackathon Participation and Registration

MEF has indicated that there are 50 open seats for qualified experts to participate in the LSO Hackathon. The recommended background for participants includes one or more of the following:

• OpenDaylight or OPNFV community members/contributors
• Software developers from service providers and technology vendors
• Network engineers, architects, designers, etc. from service providers
• MEF specification contributors
• MEF Carrier Ethernet Certified Professionals (MEF-CECPs).