May 2018 

By Gianpietro Lavado, Solutions Architect, Whitestack

Open Source MANO, the ETSI-hosted project to develop an open source NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) software stack aligned with ETSI NFV and Information Models, presented a workshop at the recent Layer 123 NFV & Zero Touch World Congress (San Jose, CA), aiming to show its recent innovations and production readiness.

The event was kicked-off by the ETSI’s Director General, Luis Jorge Romero, who highlighted the importance of hosting this open source project and its positive impact on evolving ETSI’s NFV standards.

An introduction to OSM was then given by the project’s Chair, Francisco-Javier Ramón (Head of Network Virtualisation, GCTIO | Telefónica). He highlighted many interesting things worth listing:

• An evolving architecture focused on real-life NFV deployments over diverse environments.
• A growing community of 95+ members, including many Global Service Providers, leading IT/Cloud players and VNF vendors who drive OSM’s roadmap in a use-case basis.
• Survey information showing OSM leading adoption, with data mostly coming from the US.
• A preview on Release 4’s new features, featuring an ETSI-aligned, SOL005-driven northbound interface, better performance management, user experience and a cloud-native build.
• Code becoming more efficient with each release, requiring only a couple of GBs of RAM to run the upcoming release, just 25% of the previous release requirement.
• A growing ecosystem of commercial OSM distributions

Vanessa Little (Director, Solutions Architecture | VMware), representing OSM’s Technical Steering Committee, presented then a deeper overview of the architecture and data model based on ETSI’s information models. She showed today’s architecture improvements around areas such as service assurance, usability, security, resiliency and CI/CD for an agile development.

Don Clarke (Principal Architect | CableLabs) followed, representing OSM’s End User Advisory Group, showing how his operator-led group continues to give the vision and direction to OSM by setting out release requirements every 6 months, and how this feedback has proved to be successful for both the project and NFV standards.

The workshop continued with an introduction to the OSM POC framework by Vanessa Little, which welcomes, from any organization or individual, proof-of-concepts with OSM that be endorsed by the community, introducing another path for innovation and use-case collection. She presented a couple of examples: 

• A demo showcasing OSM as an orchestrator for edge services, including video transcode at the network Edge with ffmpeg, using Fortinet as an sGW in vRAN edge scenarios, SD-WAN with Vyatta vRouter and operational intelligence for distributed architectures. PoC Participants: VMware, RIFT.io, Fortinet, DataArt
• A demo showing how easy it is to integrate external tools to model a new complex VNF, leveraging vnfonboarding.com and Pensa Maestro to generate and validate network service blueprints for OSM RelTHREE to deploy a functional IMS core PoC Participants: Pensa Networks, VMware

After that, Gianpietro Lavado (Senior Architect | Whitestack) from the OSM Module Development Group, presented a live preview of Release 4, demonstrating the newest additions that make this release so special and innovative:

• The Northbound Interface, with both a CLI and a new GUI as existing clients.
• The Kafka messaging bus, a new dedicated channel for asynchronous communication between components, which makes OSM more open and simpler to integrate with new pluggable modules.
• Monitoring module enhancements and a brand new Policy Module, both making the system ready to provide operator-friendly VNF performance and fault/event management.

Finally, Amazon Web Services, represented by Shoma Chakravarty (Worldwide Technical Leader, Telecom | AWS) gave their perspective on the importance of OSM for achieving NFV over hybrid Telco Cloud environments, as well as a demo on how easy is to onboard and instantiate VNFs over an AWS environment using OSM.

In summary, through talks and demos, this workshop demonstrated how OSM has progressively evolved as a production-ready NFV MANO stack that already meets the requirements of commercial NFV networks.