Section 1.1: ONAP's value & relevance for the industry
We are increasingly living in a "Now Economy", everyone expects everything to be instant and in real time.
Delays and long turn around times are fawned upon and are increasingly becoming bottlenecks for a seamless digital experience for consumers in every industry.
While communications industry helps in enabling everyone around us to be connected and be a part of "Now Economy", we ourselves need to be much better at it.
Disruptive technology and collective global initiatives needed for propelling us to such a digital future is impacting communications industry more than any other; primarily due to the fact that we provide the critical infrastructure required.
Agility with nimbleness, and efficiency with speed, which are required for this disruptive digitization and inevitable future, ultimately enables this smart society across a wide range of verticals including health, education, tourism, scientific and technology research etc...
Considering the importance and value derived from infrastructure modernization, communication providers are undergoing through major transformation programs around embracing Cloud, deploying NFV & SDN and launching 5G.
These new initiatives are impacting technical architectures and creating new business models and services which a digital communication provider needs for addressing the demands from "Now Economy" consumers.
Possibility to host future services on the cloud (or in a cloud like manner) has posited communication providers into a unique position.
Choices & directions are wide and challenges are huge, along with the network capabilities that communication providers know and understand well, we are having to on one hand compete with OTT / Hyperscalers and at the other hand learn from them and usher in a collaborative future of "Now Economy" opportunities.
Key is to be nimble & agile to deliver excellent customer experience while becoming more efficient and make network transparent to its users / consumers.
Technology and Infrastructure modernization has gravitated higher value from hardware towards software and that points the needle towards "As A Service" construct.
Software concepts drifts service design, deployment and management needs to evolve towards new agile paradigms which promptly reacts to customer needs on one hand, while optimizing our network & costs on the other.
Finally communication provider's future mode of operation needs to be changed, focus now is much more on data - this brings concepts like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into the communications world.
We have to create a platform which enables this 2-sided approach, is based on open standards and is completely software based. Such a platform must have some key features - As A Service Exposure, Service Orchestration, Template Based Service Design, Data Analytics, Network & Application Controllers, Operational Tools etc... to name a few.
Availability of such a platform will help communication providers with the required business transformation and will solve operational pain points to coordinate and automate management of cloud, networking and application workloads in both physical and virtual world.
The future landscape of industry is rapidly changing and will require to re-define caveats of Moore’s law and Shannon limits covering a wider industry use cases backed by a rich ecosystem.
Such a holistic future ambition can surely be achieved if communication providers embrace power of collaboration and crowd-sourcing.
In this new era, communication industry is pooling and sharing best resources for initiatives where previously they have competed.
As we know, Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) was formed to address exactly the same.
Since communications industry embarked on its journey towards this transformation, more or less everybody agrees on principles of opensource initiatives to deliver exponential value, however it is also a reality that the presence of so many open source initiatives in each domain makes it difficult to evaluate, benchmark vendors products and select carrier grade solutions.
ONAP aims to complement efforts by various standards organizations (Example - ETSI - MANO, ZSM & MEC, 3GPP - 4G, 5G, Radio, MEF, TMForum, OPNFV, OVP and many others) to accelerate market adoption.
ONAP is a software manifestation of innate SDOs knowledge and experience with the collaborative innovation and openness offered by open source.
Evidently there is a growing collaboration in SDN/NFV standards/open source communities, and this harmonization effort is paving the way towards the adoption of software driven networking innovation.
Section 1.2: Purpose of the Paper
End User advisory group has been created by LFN (Linux Foundation) to share views, challenges, and best practices between user organizations, highlighting new areas of opportunity for the developer community.
EUAG is made of individuals from end-user organizations, including telecommunications carriers, cable operators, network, application, compute or storage service providers.
Being the voice of end users, it is important to support the vision of ONAP and its adoption in the industry and at the same time contribute use cases and requirements to deliver maximum value to the industry as a whole.
EUAG's ONAP working group is authoring this paper, which is aimed towards sharing the views on most important considerations as well as impediments towards seamless adoption of ONAP.
We want to articulate various consumption models which are out there to support end users towards deploying ONAP framework and solutions in communication networks.
In this paper EUAG community will try to address following queries and challenges -
1.2.1 How to consume ONAP in organizations
Atul - is this section more suited for section 3 pf white paper ?
The Future services of a Digital Telco will be principally very different from those existing today. Understanding of those requirements are fundamental to enable service providers and businesses to develop, deploy and scale next-generation networks and services. The future services delivery must be automatic, flexible and reliable that can scale massively with out any coupling with the underlying infrastructure.
It is for these reasons that ONAP has gained lot of traction in the recent years delivering value to end users through service delivery simplification, cost reduction and agile services creation on the fly. Many CSPs, active members of ONAP project are now experiencing and learning to use and integrate the “whole ONAP Stack ” in their OSS environments . Since physical, virtual and software defined networks will coexist for the foreseeable future, key services need to be created across modern and legacy networks and ONAP has to be able to interwork with legacy network, EMS and NMS systems to deploy services across the hybrid networks. Starting from key use cases to deliver quick value the ONAP final target is to act as end to end and global orchestration platform to design and deliver services and to operate the hybrid network across data centers in an efficient manner.
Considering the early experience of 5G by Telco’s it seems clear the future monetization of industry requires to offer services not only in Telco but also in other verticals. Such a capability seems impossible without undergoing OSS/BSS transformation for which ONAP seems to the best fit. Infact most of operators already embrace the capabilities of ONAP and consider it as key architecture to evolve to future OSS and Assurance systems. Such transformation means carriers will be capable to scale by adding to its customers many segments like enterprises, governments, smart cities etc to mention the few. Key use cases of the digital ecosystem around 5G can be found within IoT, connected transportation, immersive technologies such as AR/VR, and other mission critical use cases.
For sure there are multiple options that CSPs can consider in integrating ONAP into their existing OSS environments, such as:
- Integrated solutions with carrier-grade versions of individual ONAP modules;
- Service models, applications and micro-services built to run in ONAP environments;
- Compliant networking infrastructure (physical/virtual), including PNFs, VNFs, domain controllers, etc. that plug into ONAP
Even though it could be complex to introduce ONAP into an existing OSS playground, the challenge will be just to manage this incremental shift towards adopting ONAP modules / components, and having them co-exist with existing management systems
This is more promising consider the fact that ONAP framework is reusable and its capabilities specifically for management and operations viz. automation, AI/ML, adaptive policy, information models, service orchestration are candidates for future use in models and use cases in other industries as well.
1.2.2 ONAP integration in a production environment
Since the release of ONAP first commercial release Amsterdam in 2017 the community has progressed a lot to cover wide range of integration and use case requirements. However, the modular nature of ONAP has worried Telco operators who has no rich R&D and development capabilities. Certainly, this perception of complexity and too much open is a major hindrance in ONAP wide adoption.
However taking a holistic view of future varying business needs and a solution that can scale and serve different verticals requires a solution that is modular and layered that will allow CSPs to describe/integrate every single component of a service within the platform itself and to define custom business process models to orchestrate the service deployment. The modular way is the right approach to meet the requirements of many CSPs (especially in brownfield situations) that have in their network a high level of legacy and industry standard dependencies. ONAP evolution will take care of interoperability across OSS and this is the easiest way to increase the adoption and presence of ONAP code and use cases in the OSS domain.
Besides to be considered also that several CSPs may have in their production environment a strong dependency to standard solutions and usually a common strategy is to push for a collaborative network: SDOs can assist with architecture, quality and interoperability of Open Source projects, as well as enhance the overall vitality of the mobile value chain. Therefore ONAP has to take into consideration its integration also with other SDOs especially with 3GPP, ETSI ISGs (NFV, ENI, ZSM), TM Forum and MEF and with Open Communities too.
ONAP community it is aware of the importance of this collaboration and it is doing the best to keep alignment and coordination. Indeed the following picture developed by LFN provides an overview of current landscape and relationship among Open Source Projects and SDOs:
Having said this the end user community believes that still there is a requirement to benchmark and define standard MVP products for Telco’s to select their vendors. It is because the early adoption of ONAP in Carrier networks proved that engineered solutions from vendors are not aligned with ONAP framework and cannot deliver long term value consider unique business requirements and use cases in the 5G and Edge service era . Following this approach is the best direction and will enable industry as a whole to select and combine different solutions and modules from different vendors in the ONAP framework achieving agility, efficiency and robustness required for future network services.
Atul - Should be attempt to map SDOs that ONAP adheres to and the status (like % or some text defining that compliance)
Saad: will update after group call as per consensus
1.2.3 Quick wins and Commercial models for ONAP
As is the case with all new technology’s adoption, we should define the MVP and how much is enough capabilities for ONAP based on use cases to drive a positive business case . This will allow to define different flavors of ONAP depending on adoption level , organization maturity and business drivers for transformation.
As a matter of fact Defining the phases of ONAP adoption is vital for an innovative initiative like ONAP , ONAP EUAG community believes Telco’s should start a journey bottom up to solve integration and interworking issues of South bound and NE’s with ONAP first . It should be followed by global SO initiative to orchestrate and deliver services across operators foot prints crossing the boundaries and final value creation should be operational efficiency combine by value addition using new innovations like ML and AI in the networking industry .
ONAP with its Dublin release, delivered on July 2019, showed both the growth of many technical accomplishments and a better maturity of ONAP Community especially in terms of relationship between carriers and vendors that have demonstrated strong cooperation in many areas, like development, security , testing and integration. This is the best way to ensure a commercial deployment of ONAP solution where CSPs provide their requirements and vendors help them in the implementation and integration.
Since the release of ONAP first commercial release Amsterdam in 2017 the community has progressed a lot to cover wide range of integration and use case requirements. However, the modular nature of ONAP has worried Telco operators who has no rich R&D and development capabilities. Certainly, this perception of complexity and too much open is a major hindrance in ONAP wide adoption.
However taking a holistic view of future varying business needs and a solution that can scale and serve different verticals requires a solution that is modular and layered that will allow CSPs to describe/integrate every single component of a service within the platform itself and to define custom business process models to orchestrate the service deployment. The modular way is the right approach
To support both the consumption and integration of ONAP in the Telco environment it is important to define the reference models for consumption as will be described in the following sections