 We were supposed to be doing it in person in Belgium, but because of this crisis, we are doing it remotely. Today, we have with us once again, Arpit Joshipura, Journal Manager of Networking, IoT and Edge at the Linux Foundation. Arpit, it's good to see you again. Well, thank you for having me virtually here and excited to be joining you. Right. As we're talking the Open Networking Summit is going on, so I want to hear from you. What are some of the key highlights of this event, some big announcement that you can talk about? From a Linux Foundation perspective, first of all, this event is global. Event has 80 plus sessions, it took attendees from over 75 countries, and a lot of buzz and excitement around the event itself, with a lot of sessions that were end user driven, operator driven as well as from our vendors and partners. If you take LF Networking and LF Edge as two umbrellas that are leading the Networking and Edge implementations here, we had a very significant announcements. I would probably group them into five main things. Number one, we released a white paper at the Linux Foundation level where we had a bunch of vertical industries transformed using open source. These are 100 plus years old industry like Telecom, obviously, but automotive, finance, energy, healthcare, etc. That's one big announcement where vertical industries have taken advantage of open source. The second announcement was easy enough, Google Cloud joins Linux Foundation Networking as platinum. That announcement comes on the basis of the Telecom market and the Cloud market converging together and building on each other. The third major announcement was a project under LF Networking where, if you remember two years ago, a project collaborated with GSMA was started called CNTT, which really defined and narrowed the scope of interoperability and compliance. We have OPNFE under LFN and what we announced at Open Networking and Edge Summit is the two projects are going to come together. This will be fantastic to a global community of operators who are simplifying the deployment and interoperability of implementation of NFVI, MANO, VNF, and CNFs. The next announcement was around a research study that we released on open source code that was created by Linux Foundation Networking. Using LF analytics and the Kokomo model for estimation, we're talking $7.2 billion worth of IP investment. This is the power of shared technology. Finally, today we released a survey on Edge community asking them, why are you contributing to open source? The answer was fascinating. It was all around innovation, speed to deployment, market creation. Yes, cost was important, but not initially. Those were the five big highlights of the show from an LFN and LFH perspective. There are two things that I'm interested in. One is the consolidation that you talk about on the second survey. The fact is that everybody is using open source, there is no doubt about it. But the problem that is happening is since everybody is using it, there seems to be some gap between the awareness about how to be a good open source citizen as well. What have you seen in the telco space? What we have seen in telco, first of all, is five years ago, they were all using black box and proprietary technologies. Then we launched a project called Open Daylight. Of course, Open Daylight announced its 13th release aluminum today, but that's on your six year anniversary. But from being a proprietary to today in one of the more active projects called ONAM, the telcos are the four of the top 10 contributors of an open source. Who would have imagined that an AT&T and a Verizon and an Arrange and DT and a Vodafone and a China Mobile and a China Telecom and you name it, they are all actively contributing code. That's a paradigm shift in terms of not only consuming it, but also contributing towards it. Since you mentioned ONAM, if I'm not wrong, I think AT&T released its own work as ECOMP and then the projects within the foundation were immersed to create ONAM and then you mentioned CNTD. What I want to understand from you, how many projects are there that you see within the foundation because the problem is that with the next foundation and all those other foundation, is there is open source work? It's a very good place for those projects to come in. It obvious that there will be some project that will overlap. You're not saying no because so what is the situation right now? Where do you see still there is some overlap happening at the same time there is still gap that you need to fill? So that's a question of the philosophies of a foundation. I'll start off with the most loose situation which is GitHub. Millions and millions of projects on GitHub. Any PhD student can throw a code on GitHub and say that's open source and at the end of the day, if there's no community around it, that project is dead. That's the most extreme scenario. Then there are foundations like CNCF who have a process of accepting projects that could have competing solutions and then may the both best project win. From an LF networking and LF edge perspective, the process is a little bit more restrictive where there is a formal project life cycle document and a process available on the Viki that looks at the complementary nature of the project that looks at the ecosystem that looks at how it will enable and foster innovation. And then based on that, the governing board and the neutral governance that we have set up under the Linux Foundation, they would approve it. So overall, it depends on the philosophy for LF and an LF edge. We have eight projects each in the umbrella and most of these projects are quite complimentary when it comes to solving different use cases in different parts of the network. Now, I want to talk about 5G a bit. I did not hear any announcements. But can you talk a bit of what is the work going on to help further deployment of 5G technologies? Yeah, so I'm happy and sad to say that 5G is old news. Right? The reality is all of the infrastructure work on 5G already was released earlier this year. So ONAP's Frankfurt release, for example, has a blueprint on 5G slicing, right? All the work has been done. Lots of blueprint in a crano using 5G and MEC. So that work is done. The cities are getting lit up by the carriers. So you see announcements from global carriers on 5G deployments. I think the two missing pieces of work remaining for 5G. One is obviously the ORAN support, right? So the ORAN software community, which we host at the Linux Foundation, also is coming out with a second release and all the support for 5G is in there. And the second part of 5G is really the compliance and verification testing. So a lot of work is going into CNTT and OPNFV. Remember that merge project we talked about where 5G in context of not just OpenStack but also Kubernetes. So the cloud-native aspects of 5G are all being worked on this year. And I think we'll see a lot more cloud-native 5G deployments next year, primarily because as projects like ONAP co-cloud-native integrates with projects like ONAP and Anthos or Azure Stack and things like that. What are some of the biggest challenges that the telco industry is facing? I mean, technically no standardization and all those things were there, but foundations have solved the problem. But where you see some rough edges that are still there that you're trying to resolve for them? Yeah, I think the recent pandemic caused a significant change in the telcos thinking. And fortunately, because they had already started on a virtualization and an open-source route, you heard from Andre and you heard from Deutsche Telecom and you heard from Equinix. All of the operators were able to handle the change in the network traffic, change in the network traffic direction, SLAs, workloads, et cetera, all because of the softwareization, as we call it, on the network. So given the pandemic, I think the first challenge for them was can the network hold up? And the answer is yes. All the work from home and all these video recordings we are doing all with the web. That was number one. Number two is it's good to hold up the network, but did I end up spending millions and millions of dollars for operational expenditures? And the answer to that is no, especially for the telcos who have embraced an open-source ecosystem and an automation way. So people who have deployed projects like SDN or ODAP or automation and orchestration or closed-loop controls, they automatically configure and reconfigure based on workloads and services and traffic. And that does not require manual labor. So tremendous amount of cost was saved from an OPEX perspective. Those two otherwise for operators who are still in the old mindset have significantly increased their OPEX and what that has caused is a real strain on their budget sheets. So those were the two big things that we felt were challenges but have been solved. Going forward, now it's just a quick rollout build out of 5G, expanding 5G to Edge and then partnering with the cloud, public cloud providers, at least here in the US to bring the cloud-native solutions to market. Now, Arpit, if I'm not wrong, LF Edge is, I think, going to celebrate its second anniversary, I think, soon in January. So if I ask you, what do you feel the project has achieved so far? What are its accomplishments and what are some challenges that the project still has to tackle? I think let me start off by the most important accomplishment as a community, right? And that is terminology. So we have a project called State of the Edge and we just issued a white paper which outlines terminology and terms and definitions of what Edge is because historically people use terms like thin edge and thick edge and cloud edge and far edge and near edge and blah, blah, blah. They're all relative terms. It's an edge in relation to who I am. Instead of that, the paper now defines absolute terms and if I give you a quick example, there are really two kinds of edges. There's a device edge and then there is a service provider edge. A device edge is really controlled by the end user, I should say. And then a service provider edge is really shared as a service and the last mile typically separates them. Now, if you double click on each of these categories, then you have several incarnations of an edge. You can have an extremely constrained edge, microcontrollers, et cetera, mostly manufacturing, IIoT type. You could have a smart device edge which like gateways, et cetera, or you could have on-prem server type device edge. But either way, an end user controls that edge versus the other edge, whether it's on the radio base stations or in the smart central office, the operator controls it. So that's kind of the first accomplishment, right? Standardizing on terminology. The second big edge accomplishment is around, I would highlight two projects, Acreno and Edgex Foundry. These are stage three mature projects. They have come out with significant, like Acreno, for example, has come out with 20 plus blueprints. These are blueprints that actually can be deployed today, right? Examples, and again, just a refresher, blueprint is a declarative configuration that has everything from end to end to solve a particular use case. So things like connected classrooms, AR, VR, connected cars, right? Network cloud, et cetera. Smart factories, smart cities, et cetera. So all these are available today. And then Edgex is the IoT framework for an industrial setup, and that's kind of the most downloaded. So those two projects, along with Fledge, Eve, Beetle, Home Edge, Open Horizon, Security Vice Onboarding, you know, NSOTE, right? Very, very strong growth over 200% growth in terms of contributions, huge growth in membership, huge growth in new projects, and the community overall. So we're seeing that Edgex is really picking up right. And remember I told you, Edgex is four times the size of cloud. So, you know, everybody's in it. Now, the second part of the question was also some of the challenges that are still there. You talked about accomplishment. What are the problems that you see that you still think that the project has to solve? For the industry and the community? So the fundamental challenge that remains is we're still working as a community in different markets. And I think the vendor ecosystem is trying to figure out who is the customer and who is the provider, right? Because think of it this way. Like a carrier, for example, like an AT&T, could be a provider to a manufacturing factory who actually could consume something from a provider and then ship it to an end user, right? So there's like a value shift, if you may, in the business world on who gets the cut, if you may. That's still a challenge people are trying to figure out. I think people who are going to be quick to define, solve, and implement solutions using open technology will probably turn out to be winners. People who will just do analysis paralysis will be left behind like any other industry. So I think that is kind of fundamentally number one. And number two, I think the speed at which we want to solve things, the pandemic has just accelerated the need for agent 5G. And I think people are just eager to get gaming with low latency, get manufacturing predictive maintenance with low latency, home surveillance with low latency, connected cars, autonomous driving, all the classroom use cases. These are like today, they should have been done next year, but because of the pandemic, it just got accelerated. Arpit, thank you so much for taking your time out today and talking about not only the event, but also the work that is going on in this space and also LFH plus also defining cloud. I wish, as I said, we could have done it in person, but we have to do with what our cards were handed to us. So once again, thank you for talking to me today virtually. Thank you very much and glad we could connect.