The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project announced that, building on its technical momentum and community growth, Comcast, Fujitsu, Infosys, NEC subsidiary Netcracker Technology and Samsung have joined as new members to contribute to the open source framework for network automation.
ONAP noted that six months after its launch it has doubled its community and projects to more than 900 contributors, 50 members and 30 projects. ONAP is working to deliver a neutral automation platform for network, infrastructure and services across service providers, cloud providers and enterprises as they seek to efficiently deliver on-demand services leveraging existing investments.
ONAP stated that it is progressing towards the first release, Amsterdam, which is due to be available later in the year. The Amsterdam release will integrate the original OPEN-O and ECOMP code bases into a common orchestration platform.
In addition, the ONAP community has established projects and technologies key to VNF orchestration that combine features from both the OPEN-O and ECOMP platforms. This effort includes tools and guidelines designed to help vendors create, integrate and validate their VNFs with ONAP; ONAP is also announcing the acceptance of ICE.
ICE, developed at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, is an incubation and validation platform for VNF's that was recently made a part of ONAP. Now known as the VNF Validation Program (ICE) Project, it includes a defined validation process and scripts designed to form the basis of the certification and self-test programs for ONAP.
The new project, along with the VNF Requirements Project and VNF SDK Project that utilise code from OPEN-O and ECOMP, will define how VNFs can obtain an ONAP-compatible label. Further key areas of integration include service orchestration, deployment and monitoring of VNFs, plus closed loop automation. Additionally, uses cases required for future carrier networks have been approved by the TSC (technical steering committee), including residential broadband vCPE, vFW/vDNS and VoLTE.
