VyOS Networks Blog

Happy new year everyone!
The year 2020 has been a productive year for VyOS. We are happy to see new contributors join and work with us; happy to see customers go with VyOS when they need an affordable, flexible, and open solution for increased networking needs; happy to see VyOS gather momentum. Here’s a brief recap of the past year, and a bit of recent plans.

For a detailed discussion of the development in 2020 and plans for 2021, we've setup an online event that will be held in Zoom, this Sunday, at 16:00 (4pm) UTC. Everyone is invited to join!

2020 recap

New features in the LTS branch

• BFD
• PIM-SM
• Intel QAT support

New features in the rolling release

• VRF
• GRE and OpenVPN over IPv6 
• 802.1ae MACsec
• DHCP-PD server and client
• FastNetMon IDS
• “IPoE” server
• Console server
• OpenConnect (compatible with Cisco AnyConnect)
• IS-IS
• Initial MPLS implementation

There are other changes, less visible but not less important. The rewrite to Python from Perl has reached a point when there’s more Python code than Perl code. We have improved the CLI performance considerably and introduced new APIs that make working with the config simpler.

VCNE certification

We’ve created a fully hands-on certification exam. It’s 100% free of multiple-choice questions. A virtual lab is spawned for you, then you need to configure it according to the specs and fix existing configuration mistakes. The solution is checked automatically by a script, so there’s no single right solution: as long as the traffic flows as it should, your solution is accepted.

The certification is free for existing customers and community contributors, and is reasonably affordable for everyone else ($200 for an attempt).

Community highlights

• Roberto Berto started working on a web GUI for VyOS named https://github.com/vycontrol/vycontrol
• New core team member: Thomas Mangin.
• BMC and patreon grown 

New supported platforms

• XCP-ng/XenOrchestra
• OracleVM Server (Xen-based) 
• Oracle Private Cloud Appliance
• Oracle Linux KVM / Oracle OpenStack

New partnerships

• VyOS on Azure achieved Microsoft Co-Sell Ready status.
• EPS Global is now selling EdgeCore hardware bundled with VyOS access subscriptions.
• VyOS on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace

What’s coming

1.3 soft freeze

You may remember that we originally planned a soft freeze for May 2020. It didn’t work out because May is a warm month in the northern hemisphere where most VyOS developers are located. January is the coldest month so it’s a much better time for a code freeze.

Seriously though, LTS release maintenance is a balancing act. If you branch it off too late, you deprive LTS users from features that are already stable and could be made available to LTS users right now. However, if you branch off too early, then features currently under development will remain unavailable to them until the next LTS release.

In the middle of the past year, many new and long-awaited features had been in active development, so freezing 1.3 in May, July, or October would mean blocking them off, since they rely on the reworked internals. Besides, we’ve had a bunch of backportable features like PIM-SM and Intel QAT that we could ship in 1.2.x releases. Now we are out of backportable features, but IS-IS, VRF, and more are finally usable and are ready for an LTS beta. Thus, it’s time to branch off.

Within a few days Equuleus branch will be created in every submodule that is still used by the next release. Since then, the current branch will be open for the most risky changes again, and the Equuleus branch will be only for stabilization, bug fixes, and backports of knowingly working features from current.

New community site and rolling release snapshots

The first version of the new community site will also be available soon. It will serve as an information hub specifically for community members and contributors, and also a place to go for rolling release snapshots.

We’ll make a separate announcement when it’s online.

1.4 (Sagitta)

The next release is named Sagitta, after a small constellation whose name means “an arrow” in Latin. Its roadmap is still to be made, and we are happy to hear your suggestions!

New partnerships & platforms

Ecosystem is power, and for us is really important to be able to integrate with existing solutions. So you can expect more supported clouds, platforms and cases.

Join us this Sunday for a discussion of the 2021 plans!

We've setup an online event that will be held in Zoom, this Sunday, at 16:00 (4pm) UTC. Everyone is invited to join! We are going to give a more detailed recap of the 2020 events, and then have a discussion of the plans, most wanted features, and ways we can improve the project.