Linux Foundation’s CAMARA project graduates to funded model

The Linux Foundation announced that its CAMARA project, an open-source community addressing telco industry API interoperability, has graduated to a funded model. The news was shared onsite during the Open Source Summit Europe opening keynote.

Initiated in 2021 by a small group of service providers, vendors and hyperscalers, CAMARA launched in February 2022 with 22 initial partners; it has since grown to over 250 participating organizations with over 750 contributors.

To help sustain rapid growth and ensure a tighter structure with more resources, the community has moved the project to the next phase and introduced a fully funded model. The funded model will introduce a Governing Board, Technical Steering Committee, and End User Council to manage collaboration at scale.

Complementing its portfolio of participating organizations, the CAMARA fund is composed of 10 Premium sponsors (including Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange, Telefonica, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile) and 5 General sponsors (including CableLabs, Centillion, Charter Communications, Scenera, Shabodi).

Focus on collaboration

CAMARA offers new opportunities for collaboration between telecom providers, GSMA, TMForum and other industries providing cloud-based services by developing an open, global, accessible API solution.

Customers and developer ecosystems benefit from consistent and user-friendly access to network capabilities, thus enabling developers to seamlessly deploy applications to run consistently across telco networks and countries. The Linux Foundation said this prevents fragmentation and empowers faster, more versatile advancement of global application portability and broad industry adoption of new features and capabilities.

"CAMARA is partnering with the whole industry to provide the right telco APIs to meet the demands of our enterprise and developer users. For that, the funded model will help us to improve tooling and services and to enable shorter delivery cycles for the APIs," said Herbert Damker, Technical Steering Committee Chair, in the new CAMARA structure. "CAMARA is making it easy and simple for the global developer community to create new, connected solutions based on our advanced network capabilities.”

He added, "The collaboration between network operators, cloud providers, application developers and technology vendors in CAMARA has been crucial to this success.”

Accelerating multi-provider services

CAMARA is working with the GSMA's Operator Platform initiative to define a federated platform solution for exposing operator network capabilities to external applications. This partnership ensures that developers relying on the CAMARA project's API solution and abstraction will facilitate users across operator networks.

Earlier this year, CAMARA partnered with the GSMA, TMForum and LF Networking to publish a white paper, "The Ecosystem for Open Gateway NaaS API Development." The report outlines collaborative concepts of Open Gateway (a framework of common network APIs designed to provide universal access to operator networks for developers, helps application developers enhance and deploy services more quickly across operator networks via single points of access to the world's largest connectivity platform) Network as a Service (NaaS) architecture. 

CAMARA will continue collaborating with GSMA and TM Forum via Technical Steering Committee (TSC) representation to continue industry harmonization.

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