At last year’s SDN World Congress in Dusseldorf the concept of an open source NFV MANO platform was just an idea. 12 months later it’s trial-ready code. The ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) community kicked off SDN World Congress with a technically deep and, at times, entertaining OSM workshop. The workshop featured learning sessions from each of the seed code contributors, RIFT.io, Telefonica, and Canonical as well as terrific insights from the OSM Technical Steering committee and End User Advisory Group. The buzz surrounding OSM was evidenced by the nearly 100 attendees that came to learn more about the recent OSM Release ONE and OSM’s development roadmap. 

OSM’s Chairman, Francisco-Javier Ramón, got things started with an introduction to the OSM community and OSM Release ONE. Francisco Javier covered the key features of Release ONE and Release ONE’s goal of making it easy to test OSM and build trials. He also introduced OSM’s network of remote labs that enables continuous and automated testing with different types of infrastructures (VIMs, SDN Controllers and NFVIs). OSM has made some bold plans for the next six months, including the support of new types of infrastructures, integrated approaches to Security and Service Assurance, the participation in the upcoming ETSI NFV Plugtest™, and new POCs and demos based on Release ONE. The OSM community is making a bold statement that Release TWO will be deployment ready. 

Following Francisco-Javier, Andy Reid gave his perspective as the leader of the OSM End User Advisory Group. A key principle of OSM is that it is “operator led and requirements driven.” Andy drove home the key point that OSM’s goals are to deliver usable and industrial strength code for users and, equally important, give operators and developers the ability to learn by doing. He stressed that this is a whole new world for carriers and the value of open source is to foster an active development process and create a rapid feedback flow which will contribute to advances in architecture and standards. 

Adrian Hoban, the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) of OSM built on Francisco-Javier’s session with a deep dive into the architectural principles of OSM and its scope and mapping to ETSI NFV. Adrian discussed OSM’s development themes which include easy onboarding & VNF packaging, simplified install and upgrade processes, improved development environment, service modeling, EPA, support for multiple VIMs and SDN controllers, and multi-site capability. Adrian provided some real depth that the audience appreciated. Attendees were very engaged and asked a lot of questions covering security, which SDN controllers are supported, the relationship between VNFM and NFVO and how OSM will evolve to commercial software. It was great to see so much interest from the audience, and it was very clear to me that OSM is addressing a gap in the market. Developers and operators are anxious for commercially viable MANO software.

During the afternoon, the workshop focused on OSM tutorials with Francisco-Javier walking through the download and installation process, followed by RIFT.io’s VP of Service Delivery, Noel Charath, demonstrating OSM Release ONE VNF Package creation, the GUI, and onboarding process. Lots of audience members were taking pictures as Noel demonstrated the Service Composer, and once again, the audience was very engaged and asked a lot of questions. 

The last technology session of the day featured Canonical’s CEO and member of OSM’s TSC, Mark Shuttleworth. Mark’s theme was cloud native data modeling and model driven operations. He stressed the importance of getting operators to cloud speed. He also won the award for memorable quote of the day: “The great thing about RIFT.io is it speaks telco, the great thing about Canonical (Juju charms) is it doesn’t.” The point being that the contributions of RIFT.io and Canonical are complementary and that OSM is bridging the worlds of telecommunications and cloud-native architecture and applications. 

Chris Buerger, the chairman of the OSM Marketing Task force finished the day pointing out that OSM is the fastest growing NFV open source project in the history of NFV open source projects. OSM is closing in on 50 corporate members. He had a simple message of, “Join us.”

Very often, trade shows are full of high-level marketing and product pitches. As the marketing lead at RIFT.io, I came away very impressed with the OSM workshop, which featured very rich content and provided real technology depth. If you missed it, slides and video recordings are available at  www.layer123.com/sdn-webcast. It was a great way to start the conference and served as a foundation for a lot of conversations on the expo floor and at cocktail hours and dinners. Nearly every conversation we had in the RIFT.io booth with carriers, VNF builders, and press and analysts featured OSM discussion and lots of questions about Release ONE and the roadmap. OSM’s momentum is undeniable and I’ll echo Chris’s message: Join us!