Sophia Antipolis, 28 July 2020

ETSI is pleased to unveil Open Source MANO (OSM) Release EIGHT. This new release adds ultra-scalable service assurance capabilities, support for new resilience schemes, and facilitates the visual operation for large-scale network deployments from Cloud to Edge.

Much more than “bells and whistles”, Release EIGHT brings a new framework for the real-time gathering of metrics and alerts, designed to manage service assurance in large production deployments. Although this new framework is agnostic of the specific monitoring method, Release EIGHT makes the use of SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) monitoring particularly easy, considering its vast popularity in commercial VNFs (Virtual Network Functions).

"When operating in production, monitoring of the Network Services is very critical. In Release EIGHT a new execution framework was added, to run distributed monitoring tasks in Kubernetes. This new monitoring architecture is scalable, and allows OSM to monitor by using SNMP in any existing VNF, or adapt to any more efficient telemetry mechanism in the future," says Gianpietro Lavado, Senior Solutions Architect at Whitestack.

For Release EIGHT, OSM's VNF configuration layer (VCA) has introduced a new scheme for high-availability setups that greatly improves its resiliency to potential outage events. This Release also extends the support and flexibility of configuration tasks for the various components within a Network Service or Network Slice. These processes can now be launched from Kubernetes clusters in addition to Linux Containers, making the management of these critical processes more convenient for their operation at scale.

“OSM Release EIGHT is able to operate hybrid scenarios that now include Kubernetes network functions through a uniform mechanism. A new installer enhances flexibility by providing options for high-availability OSM deployments. By introducing DevOps best practices to the OSM community, we are pleased to have contributed to the improved code quality, looking ahead to a carrier-grade OSM,” says Alex Chalkias, Product Manager at Canonical.

There have been significant improvements in usability in this release as well, the main one being the incorporation of a new graphical user interface (GUI) based on Angular, with a renewed and more intuitive look and feel, that will facilitate the operation for large and distributed deployments.Ramesh Ramanathan, Principal Architect at Tata Elxsi’s CTO Office says “OSM Release EIGHT takes a giant leap towards production readiness and Tata Elxsi is excited to be one of the driving forces behind this evolution. The brand new “Next-Gen UI” incorporated in this release is tuned for production management, monitoring and maintenance. This will help operators with better data center management, advanced Day 2 configuration support, enhanced RBAC and multi-language support”.

In terms of interoperability, OSM Release EIGHT extends its support of relevant SDN technologies with the incorporation of new plugins for Arista CloudVision and Juniper Contrail. These come on top of a large list of VIM and SDN technologies that are already supported out-of-the box by OSM.

In addition, this new release makes the creation and consumption of VNF/NS packages significantly easier with the possibility of using remote catalogues of OSM-ready packages, making their publication, maintenance and consumption comparatively easy, even for less-experienced users.

Commitment with testing and interoperability

During the preparation of this release, OSM renewed its commitment to test and maintain interoperability with the most relevant technologies available on the market. As such, all OSM distributions successfully participated in the recent NFV&MEC Plugtests 2020 last June. Along with the other participants, OSM distributors were actively engaged in testing multi-vendor Interoperability and API conformance with a wide range of different Network Functions and Infrastructure. This was achieved through a number of complex scenarios, including the end-to-end orchestration of commercial 5G cores, cloud native and multi-site deployments.

Successful remote Hackfests

The OSM#9 Hackfest recently took place remotely in June, allowing over 100 participants to learn step-by-step onboarding, deployment, and end-to-end testing of hybrid Network Services from their home. The main goal of the event was to deploy and orchestrate Facebook’s open-source platform, Magma EPC, with OSM. In addition, Facebook was invited to the OSM Ecosystem Day to present the current status and roadmap for Magma, highlighting some of the efforts being made to integrate the platform as a telco-grade network function into existing mobile operators and leveraging the NFV orchestration capabilities of OSM.

The next OSM Hackfest will be fully dedicated to OSM Release EIGHT and take place remotely, starting on 7 September 2020 for five consecutive days. Participation in ETSI OSM Hackfests is free and open to all upon registration. The deadline is 3 September.

To learn more about our OSM Hackfest presentations, demonstrations and Ecosystem Day talks, visit the OSM YouTube channel.

About ETSI
ETSI provides members with an open and inclusive environment to support the development, ratification and testing of globally applicable standards for ICT systems and services across all sectors of industry and society. We are a not-for-profit body with more than 900 member organizations worldwide, drawn from 65 countries and five continents. Members comprise a diversified pool of large and small private companies, research entities, academia, government and public organizations. ETSI is officially recognized by the EU as a European Standards Organization (ESO). For more information please visit us at https://www.etsi.org/

About ETSI OSM

ETSI OSM is a community-led project delivering a production-quality open-source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models. To learn more about OSM, please visit http://osm.etsi.org/

Contact
Claire Boyer
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