Editor: Ole Troan
Editor: Chaker Al-Hakim
The ONAP project addresses the rising need for a common automation platform for telecommunication, cable, and cloud service providers—and their solution providers—to deliver differentiated network services on demand, profitably and competitively, while leveraging existing investments.
The challenge that ONAP meets is to help operators of telecommunication networks to keep up with the scale and cost of manual changes required to implement new service offerings, from installing new data center equipment to, in some cases, upgrading on-premises customer equipment. Many are seeking to exploit SDN and NFV to improve service velocity, simplify equipment interoperability and integration, and to reduce overall CapEx and OpEx costs. In addition, the current, highly fragmented management landscape makes it difficult to monitor and guarantee service-level agreements (SLAs). These challenges are still very real now as ONAP creates its fourth release.
ONAP is addressing these challenges by developing global and massive scale (multi-site and multi-VIM) automation capabilities for both physical and virtual network elements. It facilitates service agility by supporting data models for rapid service and resource deployment and providing a common set of northbound REST APIs that are open and interoperable, and by supporting model-driven interfaces to the networks. ONAP’s modular and layered nature improves interoperability and simplifies integration, allowing it to support multiple VNF environments by integrating with multiple VIMs, VNFMs, SDN Controllers, as well as legacy equipment (PNF). ONAP’s consolidated xNF requirements publication enables commercial development of ONAP-compliant xNFs. This approach allows network and cloud operators to optimize their physical and virtual infrastructure for cost and performance; at the same time, ONAP’s use of standard models reduces integration and deployment costs of heterogeneous equipment. All this is achieved while minimizing management fragmentation.
The ONAP platform allows end-user organizations and their network/cloud providers to collaboratively instantiate network elements and services in a rapid and dynamic way, together with supporting a closed control loop process that supports real-time response to actionable events. In order to design, engineer, plan, bill and assure these dynamic services, there are three major requirements:
To achieve this, ONAP decouples the details of specific services and supporting technologies from the common information models, core orchestration platform, and generic management engines (for discovery, provisioning, assurance etc.). Furthermore, it marries the speed and style of a DevOps/NetOps approach with the formal models and processes operators require to introduce new services and technologies. It leverages cloud-native technologies including Kubernetes to manage and rapidly deploy the ONAP platform and related components. This is in stark contrast to traditional OSS/Management software platform architectures, which hardcoded services and technologies, and required lengthy software development and integration cycles to incorporate changes.
The ONAP Platform enables service/resource independent capabilities for design, creation and lifecycle management, in accordance with the following foundational principles:
Further, ONAP comes with a functional architecture with component definitions and interfaces, which provides a force of industry alignment in addition to the open source code.
The platform provides common functions such as data collection, control loops, meta-data recipe creation, and policy/recipe distribution that are necessary to construct specific behaviors.
To create a service or operational capability ONAP supports service/ operations-specific service definitions, data collection, analytics, and policies (including recipes for corrective/remedial action) using the ONAP Design Framework Portal.
Figure 1 below provides a high-level view of the ONAP architecture with its microservices-based platform components.
Figure 1
Figure 2 below, provides a simplified functional view of the architecture, which highlights the role of a few key components:
The Latest release of ONAP has a number of important new features in the areas of design time and runtime, ONAP installation, and S3P.
Editor: Abhijit Kumbhare
OpenDaylight (ODL) is a modular open platform for customizing and automating networks of any size and scale. The OpenDaylight Project arose out of the SDN movement, with a clear focus on network programmability. It was designed from the outset as a foundation for commercial solutions that address a variety of use cases in existing network environments.
The core of the OpenDaylight platform is the Model-Driven Service Abstraction Layer (MD-SAL). In OpenDaylight, underlying network devices and network applications are all represented as objects, or models, whose interactions are processed within the SAL.
The SAL is a data exchange and adaptation mechanism between YANG models representing network devices and applications. The YANG models provide generalized descriptions of a device or application’s capabilities without requiring either to know the specific implementation details of the other. Within the SAL, models are simply defined by their respective roles in a given interaction. A “producer” model implements an API and provides the API’s data; a “consumer” model uses the API and consumes the API’s data. While ‘northbound’ and ‘southbound’ provide a network engineer’s view of the SAL, ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’ are more accurate descriptions of interactions within the SAL. For example, protocol plugin and its associated model can either be a producer of information about the underlying network, or a consumer of application instructions it receives via the SAL.
The SAL matches producers and consumers from its data stores and exchanges information. A consumer can find a provider that it’s interested in. A producer can generate notifications; a consumer can receive notifications and issue RPCs to get data from providers. A producer can insert data into SAL’s storage; a consumer can read data from SAL’s storage. A producer implements an API and provides the API’s data; a consumer uses the API and consumes the API’s data.
The ODL platform is designed to allow downstream users and solution providers maximum flexibility in building a controller to fit their needs. The modular design of the ODL platform allows anyone in the ODL ecosystem to leverage services created by others; to write and incorporate their own; and to share their work with others. ODL includes support for the broadest set of protocols in any SDN platform – OpenFlow, OVSDB, NETCONF, BGP and many more – that improve programmability of modern networks and solve a range of user needs.
Southbound protocols and control plane services, anchored by the MD-SAL, can be individually selected or written, and packaged together according to the requirements of a given use case. A controller package is built around four key components (odlparent, controller, MD-SAL and yangtools). To this, the solution developer adds a relevant group of southbound protocols plugins, most or all of the standard control plane functions, and some select number of embedded and external controller applications, managed by policy.
Each of these components is isolated as a Karaf feature, to ensure that new work doesn’t interfere with mature, tested code. OpenDaylight uses OSGi and Maven to build a package that manages these Karaf features and their interactions.
This modular framework allows developers and users to:
The modularity and flexibility of OpenDaylight allows end users to select whichever features matter to them and to create controllers that meets their individual needs.
As we saw, the OpenDaylight platform (ODL) provides a flexible common platform underpinning a wide variety of applications and Use Cases. Some of the most common use cases are mentioned here.
The SDN Controller (SDNC) and the Application Controller (APPC) components of ONAP are based on OpenDaylight.
OpenDaylight NetVirt App can be used to provide network virtualization (overlay connectivity) inside and between data centers for Cloud SDN use case:
The components used to provide Network Virtualization is shown in the diagram below:
OpenDaylight can expose Network Services API for northbound applications for Network Automation in a multi vendor network.
These are just a few of the common use cases but the platform can and continues to be tailored to several other use cases.
Editor: Mike Lazar
Link: OpenSwitch
Editor: Rabi Abdel
The Common NFVI telco Taskforce (CNTT) is a LFN sponsored Taskforce (alongside GSMA sponsorship) and is an initiative that is aiming to minimise the number of Network Function Virtualisation Infrastructure (NFVI) configurations available (as a result of fragmentation of technologies/solutions provided by Open Source Project) and come up with few set of standardised infrastructure profiles for various NFV workloads as well as IT workloads. CNTT compromises of a Reference Model that explains how the infrastructure is exposed to workload in a standard way, Reference Architectures : Open Stack based and Kubernetes based (at the time when this WP is written) to deliver a conformant infrastructure based on those technologies, Reference Implementations: Open Stack and K8s based (at the time when this WP is written) to be used as a basis of any testing and validation activities, and Finally Reference Certifications with an extensive set of testing harnesses to be used to test the conformance of any vendor implemented infrastructure to the CNTT specifications. More information about CNTT can be found in CNTT GitHub
Editor: Donald Hunter
Innovation in the big data space is extremely rapid, but composing the multitude of technologies together into an end-to-end solution can be extremely complex and time-consuming. The vision of PNDA is to remove this complexity, and allow you to focus on your solution instead. PNDA is an integrated big data platform for the networking world, curated from the best of the Hadoop ecosystem. PNDA brings together a number of open source technologies to provide a simple, scalable, open big data analytics platform that is capable of storing and processing data from modern large-scale networks. It supports a range of applications for networks and services covering both the Operational Intelligence (OSS) and Business intelligence (BSS) domains. PNDA also includes components that aid in the operational management and application development for the platform itself.
The current focus of the PNDA project is to deliver a fully cloud native PNDA data platform on Kubernetes. Our focus this year has been migrating to a containerised and helm orchestrated set of components, which has simplified PNDA development and deployment as well as lowering our project maintenance cost. Our current goal with the Cloud-native PNDA project is to deliver the PNDA big data experience on Kubernetes in the first half of 2020.
PNDA provides the tools and capabilities to:
The PNDA dashboard provides an overview of the health of the PNDA components and all applications running on the PNDA platform. The health report includes active data path testing that verifies successful ingress, storage, query and batch consumption of live data.
Editor: <TBD>
Editor: Prabhjot Singh Sethi
Tungsten Fabric provides a highly scalable virtual networking platform that works with a variety of virtual machine and container orchestrators, integrating them with physical networking and compute infrastructure. It is designed to support multi-tenant networks in the largest environments while supporting multiple orchestrators simultaneously.
Tungsten Fabric enables usage of same controller and forwarding components for every deployment, providing a consistent interface for managing connectivity in all the environments it supports, and is able to provide seamless connectivity between workloads managed by different orchestrators, whether virtual machines or containers, and to destinations in external networks.
Tungsten Fabric controller integrates with cloud management systems such as OpenStack or Kubernetes. Its function is to ensure that when a virtual machine (VM) or container is created, it is provided with network connectivity according to the network and security policies specified in the controller or orchestrator.
Tungsten Fabric consists of two primary pieces of software
Tungsten Fabric uses networking industry standards such as BGP EVPN control plane and VXLAN, MPLSoGRE and MPLSoUDP overlays to seamlessly connect workloads in different orchestrator domains. E.g. Virtual machines managed by VMware vCenter and containers managed by Kubernetes.
Tungsten Fabric supports four modes of datapath operation:
Tungsten Fabric connects virtual networks to physical networks:
Tungsten Fabric manages and implements virtual networking in cloud environments using OpenStack and Kubernetes orchestrators. Where it uses overlay networks between vRouters that run on each host. It is built on proven, standards-based networking technologies that today support the wide-area networks of the world’s major service providers, but repurposed to work with virtualized workloads and cloud automation in data centers that can range from large scale enterprise data centers to much smaller telco POPs. It provides many enhanced features over the native networking implementations of orchestrators, including: