ETSI Open Source MANO announces Release SIXTEEN, enabling cloud-native orchestration of cloud infrastructure and applications

Sophia Antipolis, 4 September 2024:

The ETSI Open Source MANO community is proud to announce OSM Release SIXTEEN, a Long-Term-Support (LTS) release of ETSI OSM, which becomes the most innovative and feature-packed release shipped by OSM to date.

This release brings a revolution in OSM’s functionality, positioning OSM as a generalized cloud-native orchestrator for infrastructure, platforms and services, which extends significantly its former scope. Full cloud-native management of Kubernetes clusters in public clouds, together with the applications or software units running on them, is now possible with Release SIXTEEN. Every operation related to the cluster management (creation, upgrading, scaling, deletion) or the applications running on them is reflected in Git repositories, following the GitOps model. This has been possible thanks to a major change in the internal architecture of OSM.

OSM Release SIXTEEN includes significant improvements in the following key areas:

Cloud-native operations in OSM. Release SIXTEEN incorporates the provision of a management cluster for remote cloud-native management of infrastructure and applications. In addition, ad-hoc Git repositories are automatically during OSM installation to support Continuous Deployment operations. Release SIXTEEN has added the logic to define and execute workflows in a declarative way for all the new operations. These workflows are responsible for committing the appropriate intents into the Git repositories, and the OSM management cluster is in charge of synchronizing this state into different target clouds, thanks to new capabilities added to VIM/Cloud account registration.
Management of Kubernetes clusters. This release includes the full life-cycle management of Kubernetes clusters from OSM. Azure, AWS and GCP PaaS-based clusters can be created, upgraded, scaled and deleted from OSM. In addition, applications can be deployed and fully managed (upgraded, deleted) in those clusters. Finally, Rel SIXTEEN incorporates the concept of “profiles” as a way of grouping sets of software units to be deployed to a distributed fleet of Kubernetes clusters, such as Edge scenarios.
Enhanced operational capabilities. Release SIXTEEN incorporates a whole new set of operational capabilities for Network Services (NS), including the following: NS config templates as first-class citizens in OSM, support for deletion of multiple NS instances, new options to reset or reuse values when upgrading CNFs, the addition of labels to Kubernetes objects created by OSM, and improved integration of the vertical scaling and KPI-based scaling of VNFs introduced in previous releases.
Security enhancements. Release SIXTEEN incorporates important enhancements such as the password recovery based on One-Time Password (OTP) and improved audit logs for password-related and NS life-cycle operations.
OSM installation. This release introduces relevant changes in the Kubernetes cluster where OSM is installed, such as the support of K3s as default Kubernetes distro for OSM installation, and the inclusion of an ingress controller to expose more conveniently all web services in OSM, including the Graphical User Interface and the North-Bound Interface. In addition, the OSM helm chart introduced in previous releases continues evolving in Release SIXTEEN to include upstream helm charts for Prometheus and Grafana. By using upstream helm charts, those components become much easier to maintain and upgrade, while benefiting from upstream built-in features such as replication and persistent storage. In addition, OSM helm chart has been adapted to be able to work with pre-existing Mongo DB deployments, instead of using the default one coming with OSM, which enables alternative deployments in production. Finally, other dependencies such as Zookeeper have been removed, making use of the built-in replication mechanism in Kafka.

OSM Release SIXTEEN will be demonstrated during the webinar scheduled for October 29 2024, 3:00pm CET.