Linux Foundation Offers Free Open Networking Training

Software-defined networking, network disaggregation, and NFV have been major trends in the industry for several years now, but adoption of these networking models have been primarily in the service provider market. For those in enterprise IT, the technologies can often be unfamiliar territory.

The Linux Foundation is launching an educational effort that could help change that. The nonprofit organization this week announced a new introductory training course on open source networking technologies. Available for free and offered through edX beginning in early August, the course is designed to get students familiar with the fundamentals of concepts like SDN, NFV, and disaggregation. The foundation described it as covering the open networking stack from "top to bottom" starting from hardware disaggregation to network operating systems and controllers.

The self-paced, 10-week course covers how networking hardware is being disaggregated, how open source network operating systems run on a variety of hardware platforms, ways to automate networking tasks, how SDN controllers manage underlays, NFV, and orchestration tools.

Students will learn about a range of open source networking projects, including the Open Compute Project's Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) that's used with bare-metal network switches. They'll also learn about several open networking projects that are managed by the Linux Foundation, including OpenSwitch, Open vSwitch (OVS), FRRouting for Linux, and the OpenDaylight and ONOS SDN controllers.

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The training is designed to help students understand open source networking use cases and technical options in enterprises, service providers, and cloud provider environments.

The Linux Foundation described the course as geared for network architects and engineers, security architects and engineers, system engineers, open source enthusiasts, and university students. The instructor is network and security expert Reza Toghraee, director of ApraWare in the UK, a professional services firm focused on SDN, NFV, network automation, and cloud projects. He has designed many large campus and data center projects and is author of "Learning OpenDaylight."

The Linux Foundation also offers two other free open source networking courses through edX, an introduction to Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), and an introduction to Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).

Students can pre-register now for LFS165x – Introduction to Open Source Networking Technologies. While there's no charge for the class, students can receive a verified certificate of completion for $99.