Change is coming to VyOS project

People often ask us the same questions, such as if we know about Debian 6 EOL, or when 1.2.0 will be released, or when this or that feature will be implemented. The short answer, for all of those: it depends on you. Yes, you, the VyOS users.

Here’s what it takes to run an open source project of this type. There are multiple tasks, and they all have to be done:

  • Emergency fixes and security patches

  • Routine bug fixes, cleanups, and refactoring

  • Development of new features

  • Documentation writing

  • Testing (including writing automated tests)


All those tasks need hands (ideally, connected to a brain). Emergency bug fixes and security patches needs a team of committed people who can do this job on a short notice, which is attainable in two ways, either there are people for whom it’s their primary job, or the team of committed people is large enough to have people with spare time at any given moment.

Cleanups and refactoring are also things that need a team of committed people because those are things that no one benefits from in a short run, it’s about making life easier for contributors and improving the sustainability of the project, keeping it from becoming an unmanageable mess. Development of new features needs people who are personally interested in those features and have the expertise to integrate them in a right way. It’s perfect if they also maintain their code, but if they simply hand documented and maintainable code to the maintainers team, that’s good enough.

Now, the sad truth is that VyOS Project has none of those. The commitment to using it among its users greatly exceeds the commitment to contributing to it. While we don’t know for certain how many people are using VyOS, we have at least some data. At the moment, there are 600 users of the official AMI on AWS. There were 11k+ users last month on user guide page and it’s constantly growing since the time when I took up the role of the community manager of the VyOS project. We are also aware about companies that have around 1k VyOS instances and companies that rely on VyOS in their business operations in one way or another. But still, if we talk about consumers vs. contributors, we see 99% consumers vs 1% contributors relation.


My original idea was to raise awareness of the VyOS project by introducing a new website, refreshing the forum look, activating social media channels and introducing modern collaboration tools to make participation in the project easier, open new ways how users and companies can participate and contribute. Finally bigger user base means there’s a larger pool of people and companies who can contribute to the project. We also launched commercial support with idea that if companies that using VyOS for their businesses can’t or just don’t want to participate in the project directly, the may be willing to support the project by purchasing support subscriptions.




10 months later I can admit that I was partially wrong in my thoughts. While consumer user base growing rapidly, i just can’t tell the same about contributors and this is a pity. Sure, we got a few new contributors, some of them contribute occasionally, other are more active, and some old contributors are back (Thank you guys for joining/re-joining VyOS!). We are also working with several companies that are showing interest in VyOS as a platform and contribute to the project in commercial means and via human resources, and that is great, however, it’s not enough at this scale.


At this point, I started thinking that current situation is not something that can be considered as fair and not really make sense.


This are just some of questions that came to my mind frequently:


  • Why those who not contributing literally nothing to the project, getting the same as others who spend their time and resources?

  • Why companies like ALP group using VyOS in their business and claiming publicly that they will return improvements to upstream when they are not actually returning anything? Why do some people think that they can come to IRC/Chat and demand something without contributing anything?

  • Why are those cloud providers that using VyOS for their businesses not bothering to support the project in any way?


I would like to remind you of the basic principles of the VyOS philosophy established from its start:


VyOS is a community driven project!

VyOS always will be an open source project!

VyOS will not have any commercial or any other special versions!


However, if we all want VyOS to be a great project, we all need to adhere to those principles, otherwise, nothing will happen. Community driven means that the driving force behind improvements should be those interested in them. Open source means we can’t license a proprietary component from a third party if existing open source software does not provide the feature you need. Finally, free for everyone means we all share responsibility for the success or failure of the project.


I’m happy and proud to be part of VyOS community and I really consider as my duty to help the project and the community grow. I’m doing what I can, and I expect that if you also care about the project, you will participate too.


We all can contribute to the project, no matter if you are developer or network engineer or neither of this.


There are many tasks that can be done by individuals with zero programming involved:


  • Documentation (documenting new features, improving existing wiki pages, or rewriting old documentation for Vyatta Core)

  • Support community in forums/IRC/chat (we have English and localized forums, and you can request a channel in your native language like our Japanese community did)

  • Feature requests (well described use cases from which can benefit all our community: note that a good feature request should make it easier for developers to implement it, just saying you want MPLS is not quite the same as researching existing open source implementations, trying them out, making sample configs contributors with coding skills can use for the reference, drafting CLI design and so on!)

  • Testing & Bug reports

  • Design discussions, such as those in the VyOS 2.0 development digest


If you work at the company that uses VyOS for business needs please consider  talking with CEO/CTO about:

  • Providing full/part time worker(s) to accomplish tasks listed above

  • Provide paid accounts in common clouds for development needs

  • Provide HW and license for laboratory (we need quite a lot of HW to support all of the hypervisors, same is true about licenses for interworking testing)

  • Buy commercial support & services



In January, we’d like to have a meeting with all current contributors to discuss what we can do to increase participation in the project.

Meanwhile, I would like to ask you to share this blog post to all whom it may concern.

All of the VyOS users (especially those companies that use VyOS in their business) should be aware that is time to start participate in the project if you want to keep using VyOS and rely on it in the future.


Brace yourself.

Change is coming!

VyOS Project October Update

Hi everyone,

Last two weeks was pretty busy, and we attended multiple events, so I decided to share what happens with all of you.

On behalf of Sentrium,  I (Yuriy Andamasov, that is) with other Sentrium employees visited VMworld, OpenStack Summit, and a meeting held by an ISP consortium known as Guifi  in Barcelona this October.

Among other things, one of my goals was to find out if there’s any interest in VyOS in the enterprise and cloud markets. I’m excited to see that VyOS seems to be the best deal for many use cases. There are so many cool applications and technologies around, many of them require networking, other provide networking functions and/or orchestration functions for large deployments.

However, many people are interested in integration with management tools and other software, so we came to the conclusion that it’s a good idea to provide integration with VMware NSX and OpenStack Neutron at least, as they are quite popular. Of course, we need your help with it. If you are interested, or even already working on it, feel free to contact us, come to Phabricator or the IRC channel, or contact me personally by email (yuriy@sentrium.io) or in the RocketChat (I’m syncer there).

I’ve also had a great conversation with Netronome people regarding their SmartNICs and VyOS and how we can collaborate on open source solutions which get best from software and hardware worlds and hopefully this collaboration can bring us some truly impressive results.

As we realized and as strange it is to us, many people just never heard about VyOS and only some of them heard something about Vyatta Core, so we are trying to raise awareness of it, and that was one of the reasons I attended those events. We made some leaflets with information about the project, and I handed them out at all those events I attended. We’ll make a PDF and Scribus source files available soon so that you can print them for your own use if you are going to attend an event and promote VyOS there.

We also gave a talk about VyOS at the  Guifi meeting. Guifi members are building a big community network here in Spain, and we think that VyOS is a perfect match to this effort. Later this year we are going to give a more detailed technical talk, discuss the challenges they are having and see how VyOS can help them make their network better.

We hope this effort will help VyOS to acquire a wider community interested in open source networking. Remember that even if you are not a programmer, there are still lots of things you can help with, such as testing, feature design discussion, documentation, howtos, and just helping other community members on our forum or chat.

In other news, there will be a few more designs was added and another few will be available soon in our merchandise store

Now when this streak of community building events is over, we all can get back to working on the code. 

Daniil(dmbaturin) is working on the 1.1.8 maintenance release and messing around with the nextgen VyOS prototype, and 1.2.0 beta still needs your testing, so please, pick up it here and give it a try, but remember that it still not production ready.



VyOS Project news

Hello, Community!

We have some great news to share! 

As some of you may already know, we are planning to run virtual meeting event for VyOS devs and users in near future.

So in case you want to participate, just fill up this form and of course join us on our dev. portal to stay in touch.

May admit that this summer is productive in all aspects:

Tremendous work towards VyOS 1.2 done and we going to present 1.2.0 beta 2 in some weeks! Thanks, to our super team!

We revived OVA distribution of VyOS some months ago and continued work in the direction of extensive VMWare Platform support; we also plan to deliver supported images for all other standard hypervisors like KVM, MS Hyper-V and VyOS on clouds markets for AWS, Azure, GCE.

VyOS is now available on SolidRun ClearFog device, credits for this great work to UnicronNL, this opens new applications for VyOS.

Ansible starting from version 2.2 able to configure VyOS, so if you using Ansible, give it a try! We on other hand working on standalone management library for Python.

We receive many requests regarding GUI, and yes we are listening to them. Last four months we dedicated a lot of time to studies regarding possible ways of delivery such  UI. Apart from technical challenges, there are other problems to take into account(like service providers don't want GUI, while SMBs and ROBOs show high demand). We are working to bring satisfaction to all users without sacrifices from any side. So basically yes, it will be GUI in near future, but there are not ETAs for now.  

We believe that affordable open source routing platform and NFV should be accessible to everyone out there

Want to participate???

Join us on social networks and spread the word about VyOS - Twitter, Reddit, FaceBook, Google+, Linkedin 

Participate in discussions on forum and of course join us on development portal 

VyOS is a community-driven Linux-based network operating system for routers and firewalls

Saludos,

Yuriy

Commercial support and professional services for VyOS

From earlier posts, you may remember Sentrium S.L., an IT consulting company founded by one of the VyOS maintainers and two long time VyOS users and community members.
In this post I (Daniil Baturin, that is) speak as a Sentrium founder, so "we" refers to all Sentrium employees, not to all VyOS maintainers as usual.

Now Sentrium is ready to offer commercial support and professional services for VyOS.

We plan to use funds towards VyOS project in various ways, including hiring people for both short-term/long-term tasks like bugfix and feature implementation, documentation improvements, VyOS events, building VyOS testing labs available for all contributors, development of training and certification programs and much more

Small businesses, educational institutions, and nonprofits may be eligible for discounts (subject to review, please contact us for details).

If you are interested, drop us an email to sales@sentrium.io or visit our website (http://www.sentrium.io/).

Commercial support

We offer two types of support plans at a fixed price:

  • Basic: email support only, response within two business days, 1500 eur/year
  • Standard: email support only, response within one business day, 5000 eur/year
To clarify it: it’s not 1500 or 5000 for each router, it’s for the entire company (single legal entity) no matter how many routers it uses.

VyOS support includes answering questions that you may have about VyOS, its installation and upgrade process, features and their usage and so on. We also can review customer network diagrams and config files and suggest what features and protocols to use and what changes can be made to optimize performance and scalability.

If you find any bugs or have any feature requests, we will help you figure out the details and reproducing procedure (in case of a bug) and communicate it to VyOS developers. We also offer external monitoring and emergency security notifications as part of support plans.

Custom support plans with different terms, such as included phone support, shorter response times or 24/7 support, hands-on assistance, etc. are also available since everyone's needs are different, and it's hard to devise a one size fits all solution, the cost is negotiated on case by case basis.

Professional Services

Professional services include VyOS installation, upgrade, migration from competing platforms, configuration according to requirements, troubleshooting and so on.

The base rate is 200 eur/hour, though depending on the complexity of the task and environment it may be lower or higher.

UPD:
updated offering published here

Servers maintenance: phabricator and jessie build host

Hi everyone,

I bet you are all tired of this stuff already, but then again, so we are. We ourselves hope it's the last big maintenance we get to do at that site and then everything will stay stable for a while.

We are moving all VMs to new servers with more optimal hardware configuration and optimizing some configs. Among the VMs that will go down, likely for a few hours, are phabricator and jessie build host.

Things should get back to normal once we are done, we'll make another post when it's complete.