LF Networking to host ONE Summit North America in November

LF Networking will host ONE Summit North America 2022 in Seattle, Washington on November 15-16,.

The event will focus on best practices, technical challenges, and business opportunities facing decision makers across 5G, Cloud, Telco, and Enterprise Networking, as well as Edge, Access, IoT, and Core.

The event will feature an extensive program of 80+ talks covering the most important and timely topics across Networking, Access, Edge, and Cloud, with diverse options for both business and technical sessions. Presentation tracks include Industry 4.0; Security; The New Networking Stack; Operational Deployments (case studies, success & challenges); Emerging Technologies and Business Models; and more.

"We are pleased to host a rejuvenated ONE Summit, which brings the ecosystem together in-person once again," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "With a shifting industry that must embrace traditional networking now integrated across verticals such as Access, Edge, Core, and Cloud, we are eager to gather to learn, share, and iterate on the future of open collaboration."

The CFP is now open through July 29, 2022.

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/one-summit-north-america/register/

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LF Networking releases ONAP Jakarta

LF Networking released ONAP Jakarta -- the tenth version of its open-source, orchestration and automation framework for network operators, cloud providers, and enterprises. 

Release Highlights 

• Security enhancements in the A&AI, DCAE, CCSDK, MSB, and MultiCloud projects, reducing log4j vulnerability and removing most GPLv3 dependencies.
• Deepened O-RAN integration in the OOF Self Optimizing Network (SON) and CCSDK projects with O-RAN O1 models and the O-RAN AI Policy interface (consumed downstream by the O-RAN Software community).
• Enablement of a richer set of day-2 configuration for Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNF) through CDS API extensions.
• Intent-based networking (IBN) for closed loop for E2E Network Slicing
• New functionality in the Configuration Persistence Service (CPS) that allows more granular control of configuration-heavy network services like RAN.
• DCAE Transformation initiative was completed enabling huge resource savings and simplified deployment of collectors/event-processors/analytics microservices.
• Simplification of control loop automation architecture, enabling easy deployment of new control modules. New Network Function lifecycle management features based on real-life use cases.
• Modeling: Solidified the data model for CNFs using the novel ASD approach, while continuing alignment with data models produced by SDOs such as ETSI.
• An overhaul of the policy framework allowing easy composition of control loop policies and better observability.

In addition, ONAP Jakarta brings a number of security enhancements as well as integration with the O-ORAN Software Community (O-RAN SC). 

"We are pleased to announce that the ONAP community has issued its tenth release, ! We’ve maintained our cadence of two major releases per year and the community has really hit its stride as we continue into our fifth year as a project! It’s the ongoing, collaborative spirit of the developers and contributors across our growing ecosystem that’s established ONAP as an open source, comprehensive platform for orchestration, management, and automation of network and edge computing services," states Catherine Lefèvre, ONAP TSC Chair. 

https://lfnetworking.org/onap-issues-jakarta-release-with-expanded-security-o-ran-alignment-5g-enhancements-and-more/

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LF Networking cites carrier momentum with ONAP and OpenDaylight

In a blog post, LF Networking cites ongoing deployments by leading global carriers for its  ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) and OpenDaylight, including:

• Spark New Zealand is using ONAP as an  automation suite to support future use cases that 5G could enable, such as network slicing, and closed loop automation.  In partnership with Infosys, Spark took a relatively short six months to go from kickoff to implementation of ONAP. 
• Verizon leverages OpenDaylight as its directional SDN controller. After initial work exploring OpenDaylight (ODL), Verizon decided to pull the testing, packaging, support in-house and create their own optimized ODL distribution. ODL now serves as Verizon’s foundational and directional SDN controller with two use cases in production across the network. Currently, Verizon is using Yang model driven platform solutions and wants to integrate different types of data modeling technology, Open APIs, rest platforms, and more. 
• Deutsche Telekom deploys ONAP in O-RAN Town. In its O-RAN Town project, DT deployed in the city of Neubrandenburg a multi-vendor Open RAN trial network for 4G and 5G services with massive MIMO integrated into the live network — the first in Europe. To automate services on all network domains, DT introduced a vendor-independent Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) component based on ONAP open source. The SMO is to be at the heart of complete lifecycle management of all O-RAN components in this deployment. 
• Orange deploys automation framework powered by ONAP. Realizing a long-pursued goal of using ONAP, Orange has deployed and trialed an automation framework powered by ONAP. The current use case, in production in Orange Egypt, includes automating network services, network connectivity and resource management inside IP/MPLS, and configuration changes such as provisioning virtual private networks. 
• Bell Canada automates a significant amount of manual configuration, recovery, and provision work by using ONAP in production across multiple use cases. Since 2017, the use of ONAP at Bell Canada has expanded to automating numerous key network services across all business units. Moving forward, ONAP is playing a major role in 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) rollouts. The key metric Bell uses to measure the success of ONAP is the number of recurring manual task hours saved per month

https://www.lfnetworking.org/blog/2022/04/08/open-source-networks-in-action-how-leading-telcos-are-harnessing-the-power-of-lf-networking/

ONAP Honolulu adds cloud-native functionality, O-RAN integrations

Tuesday, May 11, 2021  ONAP  

LF Networking (LFN) announced the ONAP Honolulu release -- the eighth distribution of the Open Network Automation PlatformONAP Honolulu highlights:More Cloud Native Functionality. Honolulu brings cloud native functionality with seamless configuration of Helm based CNFs and K8s resources. This new functionality includes health checks and is implemented in the Controller Design Studio (CDS) and MutliCloud projects. An ONAP cloud native task force meets...

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LF Networking adds Edge Multi-Cluster Orchestrator project

The Edge Multi-Cluster Orchestrator (EMCO) project will join LF Networking (LFN).

EMCO aims to create a universal control plane that helps organizations to securely connect and deploy workloads across public clouds, private clouds and edge locations, with end to end inter-application communication enabled. Intel seeded code for the project. Aarna Networks is also a contributor.

“As the industry continues to evolve with even greater demands on networks, open source solutions offer a flexible, scalable model to support increasing needs,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “LFN and its growing community are pleased to welcome EMCO to the LFN roster, embracing the challenge, continuing to evolve its ecosystem with the projects and initiatives that will help carriers and vendors meet tomorrow’s needs.”  

“With the increasing adoption of cloud native technologies for building network, edge and IOT applications, having the ability to easily distribute applications across hybrid cloud or multi-cloud deployments can offer increased flexibility and scale,” said Rajesh Gadiyar, VP/CTO in Intel’s Network Platforms Group. “With very few established, truly independent open-source frameworks available today, the Edge Multi-Cluster Orchestrator (EMCO) is a notable tool for intent-based deployment of cloud-native applications to a set of Kubernetes clusters spanningenterprise data centers, multiple cloud service providers and numerous edge locations. It is architected to be flexible, modular and highly scalable.”

“There is a gap in the industry for a cloud native edge orchestration solution that works across a large number of edge and core sites,” said Amar Kapadia co-founder and CEO and Aarna Networks, Inc. “The LF Networking EMCO project fills this gap with an open source approach that includes multiple users and vendors.”

https://www.lfnetworking.org/

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Anuket aims to accelerate infrastructure compliance and interoperability

LF Networking (LFN) has merged CNTT (The Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce, which provided reference models and architectures for both virtual machine and containerized network functions) and OPNFV (the Open Platform for NFV, which reduced time to integrate and deploy NFV infrastructure and onboard VNF/CNFs), into a new open source project called Anuket.

Anuket's mission is to deliver tools and artifacts to "empower the global communications community to deliver compliant network services faster, more reliably and securely, and accelerate the transformation to cloud native infrastructures." The project delivers standardized reference infrastructure specifications and conformance frameworks for virtualized and cloud native network functions, enabling faster and more robust onboarding into production, reducing costs, and accelerating telecom digital transformation. 

OPNFV’s final stand-alone release, Jerma, delivered in December, delivered CNTT-ready capabilities, including an initial cloud native Reference Implementation and integration of cloud native testing aligned with CNTT’s R2 work. Elbrus, CNTT’s final release, planned by early February, initiates a number of new work areas, including infrastructure automation and observability, hardware management, and hardware abstraction and network fabric programmability. 

LFN said the new group will continue OPNFV’s legacy of operating upstream with collaboration across other open source projects (such as LF Networking, LF Edge, CNCF, LF AI, ODIM and other industry organizations and standards bodies). Anuket will also preserve CNTT’s close working relationship with GSMA, who will continue to publish the project’s Reference Model work.  

“It’s incredible to see the evolution of what began as the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization over six years ago,” said Heather Kirksey, vice president of Community and Ecosystem Development at the Linux Foundation. “With Anuket, we are making it easier and more efficient for CSPs to transform their networks and save money, with one, end-to-end platform.”

“The Anuket project is unique in covering Operator requirements collection and normalisation, subsequent open-source software development, through to Industry certification programs of ecosystem implementations, all under a single initiative,” said Walter Kozlowski, Anuket Technical Steering Committee co-chair and Principal, Cloud Infrastructure Architecture, at Telstra. “I am proud to serve in the role of a co-chair of its Technical Steering Committee, and I am excited by the unique opportunity this project creates for my company and for the whole industry, in the area of network transformation and related telco open infrastructure.”

“I’m very excited about the merging of CNTT and OPNFV into a single entity,” said Andre Fuetsch, CTO, Network Services, AT&T. “This move will empower the global communications community by bringing together reference cloud infrastructure models and architectures with conformance programs and tools to deliver network services faster, more reliably, and securely. The collaborative spirit of this open source development effort will help grow the communications industry to new levels of service for all stakeholders. Empowering the global society to benefit. We at AT&T are proud to be part of this initiative and look forward to supporting Anuket in the coming years.”

https://anuket.io/

• Anuket is the Egyptian Goddess of the Nile

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Google Cloud joins Linux Foundation Networking

Google Cloud has joined LF Networking (LFN) as a Platinum member.

LFN facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects.

Google Cloud joins additional LFN Platinum members: Amdocs, AT&T, Bell, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Nokia, Orange, RedHat, Samsung, Tech Mahindra, Turk Telekom, Verizon, VMWare, Vodafone, and ZTE. 

“We look forward to working with all members and the larger community to continue to find ways to bring further value to consumers and communications services providers alike, demonstrating how public cloud can help fundamentally transform networking in new and exciting ways“, said Amol Phadke, Managing Director: Global Telecom Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “Google’s excellence in creating and sponsoring components like Kuberntes, Istio and Knative—and successfully integrating them into products like Anthos—will be a key pillar within the Linux Foundation Networking.”

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ONAP Dublin release brings more blueprints and 5G features

LF Networking (LFN) announced the fourth major release of Open Network Automation Project (ONAP) code.

Key advancements in ONAP Dublin include:

• New Blueprints -  a new residential connectivity blueprint, Broadband Service (BBS), to demonstrate multi-gigabit residential connectivity over PON using ONAP.  The multi-release 5G blueprint adds enhancements to PNF support, performance management, fault management (PM, FM) monitoring, homing using the physical cell ID (PCI), and progress on modeling to support end-to-end network slicing in subsequent releases. The CCVPN blueprint now includes dynamic addition of services and bandwidth on-demand.
• OVP Enhancements: In April, an expanded OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) was launched that includes VNF verification through publicly-available VNF compliance test tooling based on requirements developed within the ONAP community. While OVP checks against industry-wide requirements, it does not check VNF compliance against operator-specific requirements (e.g. VM flavors, dataplane acceleration technologies, and so on). For this reason, Dublin adds a Vendor Software Product (VSP) compliance check in SDC to fill this gap.
• Standards Alignment: Illustrating the significance of ONAP both as a reference architecture and reference code for an automation platform, LF Networking collaborates with standards bodies (e.g. 3GPP, ETSI NFV ISG, ETSI ZSM ISG, MEF, and TM Forum) to provide reference architectures for standards development. 
• The design time components includes a new version of the Controller Design Studio (CDS) for model driven configuration and lifecycle management of VNFs, internationalization and localization support in the Portal framework, and basic PNF package validation. 
• The runtime software includes orchestration support for cloud native network functions (CNF) through support for k8s cloud regions, with support for Azure and StarlingX cloud regions as well. 
• The Policy project has several changes changes that allow service providers to create new policies, TOSCA policies, and policy types outside the development cycle of ONAP. The Dublin release has support for multisite applications in DMaaP.  

LFN also noted the addition of six new members to ONAP: Aarna Networks, Loodse, the LIONS Center at Pennsylvania State University, Matrixx Software, VoerEir AB, and XCloud Networks.

The next ONAP release will be called El Alto.
“It’s great to see such robust ecosystem growth with new deployments, new commercial adoption, and new members,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Orchestration, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. “ONAP is now a focal point for industry alignment around MANO, conformance and verification, and standards collaboration. Dublin specifically brings 5G network automation for secure, standards-aligned global deployments on any cloud of any size or location.”

“Beyond the technical accomplishments, Dublin highlights the maturity of our ONAP Community,” said Catherine Lefèvre, ONAP TSC Chair. “The relationship between carriers and vendors has grown even stronger through cooperation in many areas, including development, security and integration. For example, Swisscom and Samsung played significant roles in this release. Their collaboration with other carriers and vendors highlights the ‘innovate together’ spirit that prevails within the ONAP community. Swisscom drove the broadband service use case, collaborating with member vendors of the ONAP open source community in development and testing. Samsung performed penetration tests that identified new requirements that were taken up as a priority by the ONAP Security Subcommittee led by Orange.”

https://www.onap.org/software

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ONAP Casablanca release and OPNFV Gambia release go live

LF Networking (LFN) announced new platform releases from ONAP (Casablanca) and OPNFV (Gambia), bringing additional support for cross-stack deployments across new and existing use cases such as 5G and Cross-Carrier VPN (CCVPN), as well as enhancements to cloud-native VPN.

"New and enhanced deployments of our platforms are popping up every day across the globe, and with tighter cross-community integration and an expanded compliance and verification program, we are well-positioned to facilitate innovative industry progress," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, the Linux Foundation. "The latest releases of ONAP and OPNFV usher in a new era for LFN as the community continues to foster an expanding commercial ecosystem."

Some highlights:

ONAP Casablanca introduces two new blueprints: 5G and CCVPN.

• The 5G blueprint provides capabilities around PNF integration, edge automation, real-time analytics, network slicing, data modeling, homing, scaling, and network optimization. 
• The CCVPN blueprint demonstrates how to provide enterprise services across operators with the use of MEF APIs. One use case is for building a high-bandwidth, flat and super-speed Optical Transport Network between two carriers and across multiple domains.
• The design time environment includes two new dashboards to simplify design activities.
• The runtime environment includes new lifecycle management functions in both the Service Orchestrator (SO) and its three controllers, expanded hardware platform awareness (HPA) to improve performance, geo-redundancy, support for ETSI NFV-SOL003 for VNFM compatibility, MultiCloud enhancements, and edge cloud onboarding.
• Adds initial integration with the PNDA project, several new collectors, policy engine updates, and enhancements to the Holmes alarm correlation engine, boost ONAP’s service assurance capabilities.
• The next release will be called "Dublin". The next design forum will be conducted jointly with the OPNFV Gambia Plugfest in Paris, France from January 8-11, 2019.

OPNFV Gambia progresses the state of NFV around continuous delivery, cloud native network functions (CNFs), testing, carrier-grade NFVI features and upstream project integration. Gambia marks the 7th public release for OPNFV.

• Adds seven more projects supporting containers (a 77% increase)
• Adds new scenarios integrating cloud native features such as Virtlet, Kata containers, VPP and OVS-DPDK. 
• Two OPNFV installers are now supporting a containerized OpenStack control plane.
• Adds support for integrating Spinnaker via the OPNFV Clover project, providing a new mechanism for upgrading VNFs in a production.
• OPNFV will now continuously publish scenario and feature project artifacts that contain the latest upstream code.
• The next release will be called "Hunter".

https://www.onap.org/blog/2018/12/04/onap-casablanca-the-story-behind-the-code
https://www.opnfv.org/blog/2018/11/13/opnfv-gambia-doing-what-we-do-best-while-advancing-cloud-native

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