OpenStack’s big tent keeps expanding: one of the newest project is Tacker.

We’ll give you a quick overview and find out how you can get involved. Superuser talked to Martin Oemke, Tacker team member and a developer at Deutsche Telekom.

What does Tacker do?

Tacker is an OpenStack ecosystem project with a mission to build NFV Orchestration services for OpenStack. Tacker intends to support life-cycle management of network services and virtual network functions (VNF).
This service is designed to be compatible with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Architecture Framework.
Tacker reduces duplicate and complex effort in the industry by bringing together a community of NFV operators and VNF vendors to collaborate and build out a template based workflow engine and a higher level OpenStack NFV Orchestration API.

What new features, enhancements or bug fixes are expected for the Mitaka release?

Here are the new features:
•Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications TOSCA-parser integration
• MultiSite VNF placement
• Enhanced VNF placement (using Nova NFV smarts)
• Automatic resource creation

Our goal was also to get into the Big Tent in Mitaka and few weeks back, we were accepted.

Beyond all this, we are growing a team that is quite diverse for an early stage project. We also increased our core team size in Mitaka.

What contributions do you need most from the community?

Growing the community is one of the top goals for the Newton release. We need to increase our core team as well. As always, we’ll welcome new community members, vendors, and operators to join Tacker.
We appreciate feedback, ideas and contributions from developers and operators. The most valuable thing is working together with the community to integrate where ever it is useful for users of OpenStack.

Currently we’re also planning to integrate to networking-sfc for Service Function Chaining Use Case and integrated with TOSCA-Parser and Heat-Translator.

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions.
For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the relevant tag [tacker]

The Tacker team meets weekly on Tuesdays 17:00 UTC @ #openstack-meeting-4 (IRC).

You’ll find documentation for getting started here:
http://tacker-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

Cover Photo // CC BY NC