ETSI OSM TEN declared as the first LTS version of Open Source MANO

May 2022

By Wajeeha Hamid, Canonical, MARCOM TF Chair

 

ETSI Open Source MANO has taken a major step towards becoming the production-ready orchestration solution of choice for Telcos. The community is proud to announce Long Term Support (LTS) for OSM Release TEN, overcoming a lot of well-known challenges in carrier-grade environments.

In production environments, the telco network functions have a longer end-of-life and require managing longer life cycles. To meet this demand, operators tend to choose proprietary orchestration tools for life cycle management and support. However, the trend is shifting towards open source solutions for network functions orchestration , which requires a reasonable amount of support from the upstream open source community. Therefore, the OSM community is there ready to win operators’  trust and help to promote the adoption of open source orchestration by providing 2 years of bug fixes for OSM LTS versions. 

 

“The OSM team has made a great effort to have our first LTS version published. From version 10.1.0 onwards, we are committed to provide periodic point releases for Release TEN with bug fixes and security patches, and we are providing our large community of end users a path to upgrade safely between versions”  Gerardo García - Telefónica - OSM TSC Chair

With the announcement of the LTS strategy, OSM has taken the necessary steps to ensure all aspects of the software will be supported for the full two years. Going forward, all even numbered OSM releases are considered LTS, while odd numbered releases receive standard support of six months. After Release TEN LTS, the next LTS release will be OSM Release TWELVE, scheduled for June 2022. Stay tuned!

OSM distros i.e. Charmed OSM, TEOSM and WhiteNFV are expected to offer OSM from these LTS since they become the most stable releases. The support will include bug fixes and security patches in the production setups.  Of course, this is of benefit to both the OSM distributions and the upstream community: real world use cases and bugs are found, and OSM becomes a more robust, feature-rich project.

 

LTS features in OSM Release TEN:

Along with the exciting features of Release TEN like distributed network function management, Microsoft Azure support, and many more. Release TEN has been thoroughly reviewed to guarantee that the libraries and dependencies  will not reach EOL during the LTS period.

  • Docker base images, modules, libraries, and programs were updated to the following versions:
    • Ubuntu 20.04 is used as base images for docker containers.
    • Python 3.8
    • Keystone version 2.18
    • Kubectl, Helm, and Juju versions aligned with Kubernetes 1.23
    • Juju 2.9.24
    • Grafana 8.1.1
    • Prometheus 2.28.1
  • Security fixes were applied to all OSM components Several bugs were fixed resulting in improvements of
    • Helm and Juju based KNF deployments
    • Persistent storage support
    • NBI and CLI
    • Deployments and installation time
    • And many more

 

LTS for open source is a long awaited promise in this era of software evolution. Trusting  open source was one of the biggest challenges for network operators and ETSI OSM has taken a good step towards becoming the most secure and trusted open-source orchestration tool.

 

Upgrade to LTS today!

Follow the upgrade procedure in the OSM user guide to upgrade from v9.0 or v10.0 to Release 10.1.0 LTS by any of the following methods:

 

Join us

  • Join the OSM Community Slack Workspace
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