The Linux Foundation has announced that Open vSwitch has joined its board. As a result of the new announcement, the open source virtual switch has now become a Linux Foundation Project.
“OVS is a great example of how open source software has enabled the networking industry to match the pace of cloud computing and help advance virtualised technologies,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation, in a statement. “Hosting OVS as a Linux Foundation Project will serve to further collaboration across users and vendors and aid in open technology development throughout the networking stack.”
Open vSwitch, often known as OVS, enables network automation through supporting standard management interfaces and protocols. It comes as an upgrade over the traditional Layer-2 Linux bridge and offers a high-performance design to address growing needs of SDN and virtual networking use cases.
Contributions to Open vSwitch grows more than 300 individuals across companies such as Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Red Hat and VMWare. The governance of the open source offering is managed by a group of top committers to the project with a variety of backgrounds and affiliations.
“Open vSwitch has become a critical piece of technology to help developers and their businesses move to a software defined and cloud development world. We look forward to continuing to work with the Open vSwitch community in its new home of the Linux Foundation,” said Kyle Mestery, distinguished engineer and director of open source networking, IBM.
The new development will not give any major impact on the existing operations of Open vSwitch. Furthermore, an open governance model will be available to the public and contributions from all interested companies and developers will be accepted directly through GitHub.
