OSM Hackfest at NetworkX event, AmsterDAM

October 2022 

By Mark Beierl, OSM TSC Member

With every release, the OSM community meets for an OSM Hackfest, where participants (such as network operators, service providers, or systems integrators) can get hands-on experience with the latest OSM features. Hackfests may also provide an opportunity for Network Function vendors to onboard their VNFs with OSM and showcase their features to other telco enthusiasts.

On 18th and 19th October 2022, ETSI's Centre for Testing and Interoperability and the OSM community organized the OSM Mid Release THIRTEEN Hackfest during the Network X event in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This was the first face-to-face Hackfest after a long 3 years period of remote events, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and such a delight to see the OSM Community again! Also, as this OSM Hackfest was co-located with the 1st TeraFlowSDN Hackfest, which took place on October 20th, it was also a fantastic opportunity to meet the ETSI TFS community, learn about their work and start building synergies. TeraFlowSDN is a new ETSI-hosted open source project developing a cloud-native SDN controller for smart transport networks, which has already showcased interoperability with OSM. 

The OSM Hackfest took the form of four individual tutorials featuring OSM Release TWELVE. 

>The first day started with an introduction to OSM by Wajeeha Hamid (Canonical) and an overview of a number of orchestration business cases by Ramesh Ramanathan (Tata Elxsi). 

After that, it was my turn to start the hands-on activities, guiding participants to connect to their Hackfest environment, understand the pre-deployed setup, and perform some basic tasks, such as deploying and updating a Network Service. 

Moving forward, the Hackfest continued with a session by Preethika P. (Tata Elxsi) on VNF Orchestration. The session was illustrated with some hands-on activities with NextEPC, a virtualized 4G Evolved Packet Core and all the related Day-0, Day-1 and Day0-2 operations allowing the service to be fully operational through its lifetime. During the 2nd part of this session, Preethika guided participants through the onboarding workflows and service assurance capabilities in OSM Release TWELVE, such as service monitoring, auto-healing, alerts, network service policy updates and auto scaling.

The 2nd day started with a session by Gulsum Atici (Canonical) dedicated to the orchestration of Kubernetes based Network Functions with OSM. Gulsum explained the onboarding using both Juju bundles (a collection of Charms which facilitate the deployment of complex sets of services in one go) and Helm charts, and the operation of these network functions using OSM Primitives based on Juju Charms, which are a set of the scripts for deploying and operating applications across different scenarios and substrates, from virtual servers to Kubernetes clusters, in private or public clouds. The session was illustrated with Magma, a 5G core running on Kubernetes. She guided participants in deploying the Magma orchestrator using Juju bundles, then PowerDNS was deployed using Helm Charts and operated with OSM Primitives.

The last session of the hackfest was dedicated to the orchestration of Physical Network Functions (PNF), and the use of OSM to manage network functions that already exist in the network, that is, working in brownfields. It was my turn to discuss with participants the concept of PNF, which may not only refer to bare metal, but it can also apply to a network function whose lifecycle is managed by another entity. A PNF can be in the form of a Virtual Machine (VM), physical appliance, or even a containerized or kubernetes based network function, and all three of them can be orchestrated by OSM. 

All the hackfest material, presentations and videos are available in this wiki.

>Despite OSM Release TWELVE being a Long Term Support (LTS) release targeting production environments and stability, it bringed a number of new and exciting features and capabilities which made this hackfest’s sessions really vibrant, generating lots of interest, questions and interaction with participants

And not all was hacking!! On Wednesday evening, the OSM community met with the TeraFlowSDN community, ETSI staff, ETSI delegates and friends at the ETSI booth for a nice (and well deserved!) networking event, allowing once again to reconnect with each other and to get to know new participants after this long period of remote interactions. 

Following this hackfest, the OSM community will meet again end of November in Madrid, Spain, for our OSM#14 Plenary, where we will announce OSM Release THIRTEEN and kick-off the Release FOURTEEN cycle. Looking forward to seeing you all again in Madrid!