Networks have become indispensable infrastructure in modern society. The danger is that these networks tend to be closed, proprietary, complex, operationally expensive and inflexible, all of which impede innovation and progress rather than enable them. Presenting an alternative vision—that networking can serve the public interest—is the Open Network Operating Sytem, or ONOS Project. ONOS is an open-source, software-defined networking (SDN) OS for service providers that has scalability, high availability, high performance and abstractions to simplify creation of apps and services. The platform is based on a solid architecture and quickly has matured to be feature-rich and production-ready.

Recently ONF/ON.Lab announced availability of a new ONOS release that broadens the ability to bring SDN and NFV agility to mission-critical networks. By adding support for "incremental SDN" alongside the "disruptive SDN" capabilities for which it long has been known, ONOS now can address an ever-wider array of deployment scenarios. Additional enhancements include an improved whitebox leaf-spine fabric solution to support IPv6 routing, vLAN tagged external interfaces and AAA endpoint authentication, as well as an enhanced GUI v2.0 that improves usability on large-scale networks by providing regional topology views with drill-down, context-sensitive help and global search, among others.