Last year the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) team boasted a bit that we were the fastest growing NFV open source project in the history of NFV open source projects. That was when OSM had grown to 50 members and two code releases in less than 12 months. It’s a year later and guess what? OSM still is the fastest growing NFV open source project! OSM now features over 80 members including 9 network operators, and already has another code release, OSM Release Three to show the world. On top of that, OSM is also a finalist for a Network Transformation Award, “Best Open Source Development”. The OSM community welcomed approximately one hundred attendees to the workshop at the SDN NFV World Congress in The Hague, a terrific turnout during a day busy with multiple technology workshops.

The OSM community kicked off SDN NFV World Congress on Monday October 9th with a technically deep, yet user-friendly, Workshop and Tutorial session. In the spirit of community and collaboration that typifies open source, the workshop featured presentations and tutorials from a broad cross-section of community members and participants that offered valuable perspectives.

The OSM team has learned a lot over the past year, not just through specification and code development, but also through practical hands-on testing. This made this year’s workshop the best yet. The following summarizes the key topics and takeaways:

• Introduction to OSM - OSM’s Chairman, Francisco-Javier Ramón (Telefonica), introduced the OSM community and gave an overview of the first OSM releases. The session also included an overview of key themes for Release Three and view of the development roadmap.
• Panel Discussion – OSM End User Advisory Group Perspective – Unlike other telecom-focused open source projects, OSM is operator-led and requirements-driven. Andy Reid gave his perspective as the leader of the OSM End User Advisory Group and introduced the panel that featured insights from telecom operators that have tested OSM, contributed requirements, and provided feedback to the developer community.
  Tetsuya Nakamura of CableLabs (and vice chairman of ETSI NFV ISG) walked the audience through his experience with a proof of concept virtualizing multiple access networks. Next, Diego Lopez of Telefonica (chairman of ETSI NFV ISG) discussed how open source communities and standards organizations are complementary; they create “virtuous circles” where open source projects impact standardization and standards bodies can stretch the scope of open source and explore additional scenarios and technologies, all while keeping OSM’s focus on orchestration and automation.
  The two panellists sharing their experience provided a valuable end-user perspective on the use of open source software in the telecommunications industry overall and OSM in particular.
• OSM Architecture and Data Model Overview – To achieve the key goal of deployment and operations automation, OSM is model-driven. Adrian Hoban (Intel) provided an overview of the OSM architecture, the mapping between OSM and the ETSI NFV MANO logical view, and summarized the new Release Three features. Adrian also provided an overview of the OSM data models for the VNF Descriptor (VNFD) and the Network Service Descriptors (NSD) and how some of the salient attributes are handled in OSM. Adrian drilled down into two of the key new features, Multi-Project and RBAC support, and gave a sneak peek into the plans for Release Four and encouraged the audience to participate in its development.

The second half of the workshop turned its focus purely to the OSM software. First, Noel Charath (RIFT.io) walked attendees through the OSM interface and features. The audience also viewed a recorded demo of the new RBAC and multi-tenancy features in OSM Release Three.

After Noel, Nathan Rader of Canonical discussed configuration management via Juju charms. Nathan also gave a quick look ahead to fully realized Juju charms in the upcoming OSM Release Four.

Following Dan, VMware’s Vanessa Little, Senior Manager, NFV Ecosystem Architecture gave an overview of how to submit an official ETSI OSM Proof of Concept. She also provided a preview of ETSI OSM PoC Two, “OSM with VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) Architectures", which features VMware, RIFT.io, Fortinet, and DataArt.

Of course, the OSM workshop featured some slideware but the main focus was on learning sessions where the OSM software itself was the star of the show. This year was very interactive with engaged attendees asking a lot of great questions that triggered valuable discussions that benefitted everyone. We in the OSM community are excited about our latest software release and were impressed by another energized and engaged audience for the OSM Breakout. We enjoyed sharing the new capabilities and, more importantly, answering questions and interacting with the Congress attendees! We’re looking forward to working with the community again at the upcoming ETSI NFV Plugtest Two In January 2018.

We expect to have recordings of the presentations online within about a month. Please check back here then to view them.