ETSI Open Source MANO Announces Release EIGHTEEN, Continuing to Advance Declarative Infrastructure and Application Management

 

Sophia Antipolis, 09 September 2025: The ETSI Open Source MANO community is proud to announce OSM Release EIGHTEEN, a Long-Term-Support (LTS) release of OSM, meeting the established cadence of two releases per year and incorporating the latest innovations produced by the OSM Community.

OSM Release EIGHTEEN builds upon the architectural evolution of previous releases, further consolidating OSM as a cloud-native orchestrator for infrastructure, platforms, and services. This release introduces significant advancements in declarative operations, cluster management, and modular installation, reinforcing OSM’s position as a leading open-source orchestration solution.

OSM Release EIGHTEEN includes major improvements in the following key areas:

  • Advanced Application Modelling for Declarative Operations: This release introduces the concept of Applications as first-class entities in OSM, designed to model and manage software instances through intents. These model-driven declarative applications build upon the existing concepts of OKA (OSM Kubernetes Application) and KSU (Kubernetes Software Units). The new framework offers the following enhancements:
    • A structured model descriptor within OKA blueprints to declare components, traits, parameters, and transformations.
    • Enabling a single Argo Workflow for all App operations. An input to the workflow will be the model, which will include all the required intent transformations and generations.
    • Supporting multiple KSUs per App, with optional components.
    • Allowing users to define or override transformation logic using a high-level, type-safe scripting interface, thanks to a new OSM’s SDK for intent transformation and generation.
  • Enhanced Cluster Management: OSM continues to expand its support for Kubernetes-based infrastructures. Release EIGHTEEN adds cluster creation and management capabilities for OpenShift-based infrastructures. It also introduces support for multiple node groups within clusters created by OSM in AWS, offering greater flexibility and scalability in cluster design.
  • New IaaS types as VIM connectors: This release introduces a new VIM plugin for VMware vCenter, enabling the deployment and orchestration of workloads in vCenter environments. It also includes support for console access to virtual machines deployed via OSM in vCenter, enhancing operational visibility and control.
  • Modular OSM Installation: The installation process of OSM has been modularized for better maintainability and customization, allowing administrators to tailor the installation process to their specific requirements. Additionally, Airflow and MongoDB Helm charts have been integrated as sub-charts within the main OSM Helm chart, creating a single all-in-one OSM helm chart with all components included.
  • LTS and Code Maintenance for the Service Assurance Framework: As part of the long-term strategy to consolidate the Service Assurance (SA) framework based on Airflow, this release removes the legacy POL and PLA modules from the OSM Helm chart. Additionally, the MON module has been streamlined to retain only the dashboarder component, thus reducing complexity.

 

OSM Release EIGHTEEN will be showcased in a dedicated webinar on Tuesday 16 September 2025 at 3:00pm CET. Register there: https://www.etsi.org/technologies/10-events/2555-osmrel18