ETSI OPEN SOURCE MANO ANNOUNCES RELEASE FIFTEEN, LEANER and EAsier to Maintain

Sophia Antipolis, 21 December 2023: The ETSI Open Source MANO community is proud to announce OSM Release FIFTEEN, meeting the well-established cadence of two releases per year. The OSM community delivers one Long Term Support (LTS) and one regular release every year, to ensure the OSM user base is provided with continuous innovations and production-ready stability.

OSM Release FIFTEEN is a regular release including significant improvements in many key areas, such as:

Network Service instantiation and lifecycle management. Release FIFTEEN enables new use cases in private clouds based on Openstack, such as the support of Service Function Chaining and the support of Availability Zones for Cinder-based storage when instantiating a Network Function. In addition, a new cancel operation has been added for Network Service lifecycle, which allows cancelling a pending action over a Network Service.
Support of new Kubernetes features. This release includes the support of OCI registries for Helm-based Kubernetes Deployment Units (KDU). OSM can now retrieve helm charts from both authenticated and non-authenticated OCI registries. In addition, the support of Helm v2 for Helm-based KDU and Execution Environments has been discontinued, following the upstream recommendation from Helm upstream.
VNF Management interface. Release FIFTEEN continues enriching the SOL003-based VNFM API offered by OSM, in addition to the main SOL005 API. Specifically, in this release dual-stack IP support has been added to enable operators to assign both IPv4 and IPv6 static addresses to VNFs launched through the VNFM API.
Closed-loop life cycle in public clouds. In the last two releases, a new Service Assurance (SA) framework based on Apache Airflow was introduced. Release FIFTEEN improves this new SA framework with the capability of gathering resource consumption metrics from VMs deployed on Google Cloud. This, combined with the closed loop workflows, enables auto-healing and auto-scaling capabilities for VNFs running in Google Cloud.
OSM installation. This release leverages the OSM helm chart introduced in Release FOURTEEN community installer and extends it to include upstream helm charts for Kafka, Zookeeper, MongoDB and MySQL as dependencies. By using upstream helm charts, those components will be easier to maintain and upgrade, while benefiting from upstream built-in features such as replication and persistent storage. In addition, all container images that have reached or were close to End-Of-Life support have been updated to guarantee proper support in the coming years. Finally, preparing for the discontinuation of Juju support in future LTS releases, the use of Juju and its dependencies has been made optional since Release FIFTEEN. As a result, Juju-based EE and KDU will only be available when Juju has been enabled during OSM installation.
End-to-end testing. In this release cycle, the testing pipeline of OSM community has evolved to include regular tests over Azure Public cloud in the upstream builds, paving the way to testing other clouds regularly in the future, such as AWS or Google Cloud. In addition, the Robot based E2E test framework has been enhanced to include well-known linters such as Robocop and Robotframework-lint, which facilitate the maintenance of OSM E2E tests.

OSM Release FIFTEEN will be demonstrated during the first weeks of 2024 with a Webinar and a Tutorial, stay tuned!