Section 1.1: ONAP value to the Industry
Technology disruption and global initiatives for a Digital future world has influenced Telco industry more than any other primarily due to the reason that Telco’s provide a critical infrastructure whose agility and future readiness acutely adds value to economy, digitization and smart society across a wide range of verticals including health, education, tourism, scientific and technology research to mention a few .
Considering the importance and value coming from infrastructure modernization Telco’s have undergone major transformation programs around Cloud, NFV, SDN and 5G . These new initiatives are impacting not only technical architectures but infact redefining new business models and services for a Digital Telco addressing the future customer requirements for a large range of data hungry applications. On top of it possibility to host future services on the Cloud have put Telco’s in a sense direct competitors of hyper scale cloud providers who are more nimble, agile and efficient to deliver a omni channel to reach and deliver value to customers.
Technology and Infrastructure modernization have shifted the value chain from hardware to software and which mandates Service design, deployment and management needs to evolve towards new agile paradigms to promptly react to customer needs and to optimize overall costs .The finally Telco’s future operation (FMO) need to be changed with focussing more on Data to bring Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence(AI) advantages to the Telco world .
Such results can only be achieved by the introduction of a service orchestrator that can address both the business transformation and solve operational pain points to coordinate and automate cloud , networking and workloads in both physical and virtual world and the Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) was formed to address and solve these challenges.
Atul - Do we want to specifically called out service orchestrator ??? ONAP is much more than SO ?
Saad: As major Operators are defining E2E SO layer that will include all possible functions comnig from ONAP , so E2E SO looks a best stanza defining it , will update after group call as per consensus
The future landscape of industry is 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 only be achieved if Telco’s embrace power of collaboration and crowdsourcing. In the new era Telco industry is pooling and sharing best resources for initiatives where previously they have competed.
Since the time Telco industry embarked on its journey to transformation more or less everybody agreed on principles of opensource initiatives to deliver 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 MVP products and select carrier grade solutions .ONAP, thanks to the effort of Telco Industry stakeholders across a wider ecosystem is a solution that aims also to complement standards efforts (ETSI, 3GPP, MEF, 5G,MEC, TM Forum, OPNFV,OVP ...) to accelerate market adoption by merging the innate SDOs knowledge and experience with the collaborative innovation and openness offered by open source. Currently 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.
Here to add ONAP info getting some text already available about road map, etc….?? Frankfurt key targets and road map need a diagram (Cecilia, Beth) ?
Section 1.2: Purpose of the Paper
EUAG (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 EUAG is important to support vision of ONAP adoption in the industry and in the same time to contribute for use cases and requirements quantification which delivers maximum value to the industry as a whole. ONAP EUAG has taken the initiative of this paper to share views on most important challenges impeding adoption of ONAP and consumption models that will support end users to deploy ONAP framework and solutions in the 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