Finding itself close to being overwhelmed by the sheer number of open-source networking projects it manages, the Linux Foundation said Tuesday it has decided to create a single administrative structure to govern them all.

Called the “LF Networking Fund,” the new initiative is a kind of umbrella organization for several networking projects, including the Open Network Automation Platform, OpenDaylight, the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization, the Platform for Network Data Analytics, the Streaming Network Analytics System and the Fast data – Input/Output project.

The Linux Foundation says the new organization is necessary because software-defined networking is growing at such a rapid pace that participants in those projects are becoming concerned about overlap and interoperability, and they’re demanding more consistency.

The LF Networking Fund is modeled on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is an umbrella organization for various open-source cloud development projects.

Each of the projects in the LF Networking Fund will continue to operate under its existing charter, maintaining technical independence, release roadmaps and so on. However, staff and financial resources will be shared across the projects via a unified governing board, the Linux Foundation said.

The goal is to increase community collaboration with a focus on “building a shared technical investment (without risk of fragmentation), while also providing space for inter-project architectural dependencies to flourish (e.g., multi-VIM collaboration, VNF onboarding, etc.).”

The Fund also envisions that it can enhance operational efficiency among the various projects by enabling them to “share development and deployment best practices and resources such as test infrastructure, and to collaborate on everything from architectural integration to industry event participation.”

The Foundation said that members will be offered differing levels of membership in the LF Networking Fund, with the more expensive levels coming with seats on the various committees that steer each of the projects it covers.

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