I attended the ONS Europe that took place in Antwerp, last month. I am going to share my thoughts on the conference in general, and ONAP related topics in particular.

We participated in the Linux Foundation booth to demonstrate the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP)—an open source, community-led compliance and verification program to show the readiness and availability of commercial NFV products and services, including NFVI and VNFs. It was a joint demo led by China Mobile, Huawei, Intel, Vodafone, VoerEir and us (Aarna.ml). We showed 4 OVP demos in total: NFVI validation, VNF compliance, VNF validation using a Heat VNF, and VNF validation using a TOSCA VNF. We used the Dovetail test framework for NFVI compliance testing, VVP for static validation of VNFs (using Heat templates) and VTP for run-time validation of both TOSCA and Heat based VNFs. There was a fair amount of interest and curiosity around OVP in general, and many visitors (from operators to VNF vendors) to the booth asked for additional information and pointers on the program and felt they would benefit from this. Most of the questions from the visitors were around how they could enhance this for additional coverage of VNF-specific functionality.  

The keynote sessions were quite well-attended. Few key take-aways from my point of view, more specific to ONAP and LF Networking perspective:

• Cloud-native based architectures and deployments, specifically using Kubernetes are gaining traction and interest.
• How LFN sees the path from Open source projects to commercialization.
• Alignment of ETSI and Linux Foundation and how Open source and Open standards can work together, and seen as complementing each other, and not competing.
• The growing interest in Edge Clouds, and related technologies.

There are several other interesting presentations and while I am not going to mention specific presentations (all of which are available here), let me talk about a few themes that seem to be emerging.

Edge computing will bring together Enterprises, Telcos and Cloud vendors, with specific applications for IoT, Healthcare, Retail and so on. This is an interesting development that creates technical challenges in terms of managing and orchestrating these applications at scale.

There were presentations from Telcos that gave an overview of the 5G transition and how it is changing the landscape of services and applications that are going to be enabled as a result of this transition. This again poses several challenges in terms of orchestrating these Network Services and VNF/CNFs. Another interesting session outlined how 5G applications can be architected as cloud-native, the criteria used for disaggregating them into stateless containers, and how Kubernetes based technologies can be used to build them. The scale at which these applications are expected to be deployed is very interesting!

There were a couple of presentations from Telco operators (one of them with whom we at Aarna.ml actively worked together) on their journey with ONAP, the challenges faced by them, and the recommendations from them as consumers of this technology. The common theme in these presentations is the need for simplifying the deployment of ONAP and targeting specific use cases.

We also hosted an unconference session titled, "ONAP as a unified MEC-in-NFV Orchestrator", and while this is technically feasible, the feedback we received is that it needs more work in terms of understanding existing solutions in this space, and how vendors will perceive this as an opportunity rather than a potentially competing solution.

The ONS conference was followed by Technical Meetings of specific open source projects - ONAP, ODL and CNTT (which is a Telco task force for common NVFi or NFV Infrastructure, with active collaboration from Linux Foundation). The ONAP technical meeting is an open community event, and this specific meeting had several interesting presentations such as Edge, alignment with ETSI standards as well as various sub-committee meetings. The presentations can be found here.

Overall, it was a very interesting and enriching experience to attend this event and interact with various community members, in the beautiful city of Antwerp!

If you are VNF/PNF (xNF) vendor and are not sure how to proceed with ONAP interop, review our whitepaper on this topic. Or contact us, we will be happy to do an assessment on the various aspects of your xNF compatibility required with ONAP—VNF descriptors, configuration, lifecycle management and monitoring. As ONAP experts that have worked with 6 VNF vendors, we can also give you advice on the different strategies for interop: direct vs. via sVNFM/EMS, Heat vs. TOSCA, etc.

#ONAP #NFV #5G #MEC

In our ongoing series of blogs related to the 4th ETSI Plugtests held in June 2019, today we want to highlight the successful testing done between the Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewall (vNGFW) and our Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution (ANOD) 2.0. Palo Alto participated in the VNF category of the Plugtests and ANOD in the MANO category.

Palo Alto Networks K2-Series 5G-ready next-generation firewalls, powered by PAN-OS®, adopts a preventive security approach to provide robust and comprehensive end-to-end security strategy for mobile network deployments. Designed to handle growing throughput needs due to increasing amounts of application-, user-, and device-generated data, the K2-Series offers amazing performance and threat prevention capabilities to stop advanced cyberattacks and secure mobile network infrastructure, subscribers, and services.

K2-Series family of firewalls integrates cloud-based threat intelligence powered by machine learning and AI techniques for rapid, real-time response to threats across networks on a global scale. Gain complete visibility and granular control with automated security enforcement across all network interfaces including RAN, Roaming, S(Gi), Cellular IoT (NB-IoT) and non-3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) access.

Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) a Linux Foundation Networking open source project, includes the functionality of a  MANO solution, as described by ETSI, in terms of NFVO and VNFM, but goes beyond that by providing a real-time policy driven closed loop automation framework for service assurance. In addition, ONAP contains an inventory service and a simple-to-use design studio.

ANOD is Aarna.ml 100% pure play commercially supported distribution of ONAP. It includes an enhanced version of the ONAP installer called A-OOM (Aarna ONAP Operations Manager) that reduces 3-4 weeks of installation time to just half-a-day. ANOD also comes with basic or premium support so that you can use ONAP with confidence.

Specifically from the Plugtests point of view, ONAP has a detailed set of VNF requirements that include packaging requirements as well. The VNF descriptor can either be in OpenStack Heat template or TOSCA. The testing used the Palo Alto vNGFW packaged using a Heat VNF descriptor. Using this VNF package, we were able to onboard the VNF to ONAP’s design studio. Next we created a Network Service (NS) consisting of that same VNF. ONAP then deployed the entire NS onto a commercial cloud vendor’s OpenStack platform.

Do you have a VNF but are not sure how to interoperate with ONAP? Check out our VNF Onboarding for ONAP whitepaper.

Learn more about Palo Alto Networks’ 5G security at https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/security-for/network/5g-mobile-networks

The 4th ETSI Plugtests event was conducted earlier in June of this year. We got the opportunity to work with several VNF and VIM vendors, as well as end users.  One of the interoperability tests we concluded successfully was between our ONAP distro and Mobileum’s Smart Diameter Routing Agent (sDRA) and virtual Network Traffic Redirection (vNTR) VNFs.

A bit of background first:

Mobileum helps Communications Service Providers (CSPs) grow and protect their revenues, innovate new business models, and digitally engage with their customers. Mobileum leverages their unique technology platform, Active Intelligence, to deliver innovative analytics solutions in focused areas; in Roaming, Fraud, Revenue Assurance, Security, and Customer Engagement. Mobileum Smart DRA (Diameter Routing Agent) application leverage's Mobileum’s standards-based, carrier-grade, multi-feature platform called SDS, to provide comprehensive features and functionalities of DRA solution in a single node. Mobileum’s Network Traffic Redirection application is an innovative solution that offers mobile operator to pro-actively contact their outbound roamers by using signalling protocols to influence the choice of networks to which they latch when they roam.

ANOD is Aarna.ml 100% pure play commercially supported distribution of the Linux Foundation Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project. ONAP includes the functionality of a  MANO solution, as described by ETSI, in terms of NFVO and VNFM, but goes beyond that by providing a real-time policy driven closed loop automation framework for service assurance. In addition, ONAP contains an inventory service and a simple-to-use design studio.

Mobileum participated in the VNF category of the Plugtests and we, with ANOD,  in the MANO category. The Heat templates provided by Mobileum for the vSDRA and vNTR VNFs were first onboarded onto Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution (ANOD) 2.0 by using the Service Design & Creation (SDC) design studio. Once onboarded, the VNFs were chained together by using a common virtual network into a single Network Service along with a traffic generator. The Network Service was distributed to the run-time components of ANOD. Finally, by using the Virtual Infrastructure Deployment (VID) tool, the Network Service was deployed onto a commercial OpenStack distribution.

To learn more about ANOD or how Aarna.ml might help you package your VNF/PNF/CNF for ONAP, please contact us.

#NFV #VNF #ONAP #Roaming #Telecom #Mobileum #Aarna.ml

If you haven't watched yesterday's interview with the CEOs of Verizon, IBM, and Qualcomm on CNBS yet, I would highly encourage watching it .

If you don't have the time/patience, here's my top 4 takeaways (I'm paraphrasing of course):

1. Unlike the previous generations, 5G will have a big impact on enterprises, and the enterprise part might actually be the more exciting and a bigger revenue piece of 5G

2. It's not just 5G; it's 5G + Edge Computing + NFV/SDN

3. Enterprises will start taking advantage of 5G by 2022

4. Open standards/open source will be important

Of course ONAP didn't come up specifically. But I can't help but imagine what a great opportunity this is for ONAP. With the Frankfurt release in 1H 2020, the 5G use case blueprint will be fully fleshed out. And with the support for Kubernetes becoming more robust, any arbitrary Edge Computing application will also be supported.

While automation is not the first thing on people's mind as they roll out 5G/Edge, these services will not be viable unless there is full automation in terms of orchestration and management. When the need for automation becomes urgent (my prediction sometime in 2020), the combination of open source benefits such as vendor agnostic/no lock-in and architectural benefits such as real-time closed loop automation, positions ONAP to dominate 5G/Edge.

Not sure what ONAP is? Read our ONAP Demystified Book. If you're ready to give ONAP a test-drive, try out Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution 3.0 that comes with commercial support.

Many 0f you like ONAP. ONAP's architecture is game changing. Plus the fact that it is open source and vendor-agnostic is icing on the cake. But if you're worried about commercial support, wait no more. We announced the Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution (ANOD) 3.0 earlier today that comes with commercial support (this is our first version with support). ANOD 3.0 also includes an easy to use installer called Aarna OOM or A-OOM.

ANOD 3.0 is a 100% pure play open source distribution of ONAP Dublin. There are two levels of support—basic that is more suitable for dev/test and premium that is recommended for production environments or situations where more stringent SLAs are required.

On top of the ONAP platform, there are artifacts, apps, and dashboards. These include workflows, directed graphs, policies, analytics apps, collectors etc. This collection of components is offered under the name AarnaStream™ and requires a separate support subscription from the underlying ONAP platform.

In addition to support, ANOD 3.0 also includes an easy to use GUI based ONAP installer. This cuts down 3-4 weeks of effort in installing ONAP to just a few hours. The installer, based on the ONAP Operations Manager (OOM) project, is called A-OOM.

What's next:

• Get more information on ANOD 3.0 or see a demo video (<2 min)
• Join us for a ANOD 3.0 demo webinar on October 23 at 8:30AM Pacific Time
• Sign up for our our upcoming ONAP training in Bangalore (Nov 12-14)

If there is any way we can help you on ONAP—support, training, or custom engineering, please feel free to contact us.

I will be at ONS EU 2019 in Antwerp next week. Here is a quick summary of Aarna activities:

1. We are participating in the Linux Foundation booth to demo the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP)—an open source, community-led compliance and verification program to demonstrate the readiness and availability of commercial NFV products and services, including NFVI and VNFs. It is a joint demo by China Mobile, Huawei, Intel, Vodafone, VoerEir and us. There will be 4 OVP demos in total: NFVI validation, VNF compliance , VNF validation using a Heat VNF, and VNF validation using a TOSCA VNF.

2. We are hosting a conference session titled, "ONAP as a unified MEC-in-NFV Orchestrator" on September 25 at 13:50 in the Gorilla 4 room. Given that in the latest ETSI MEC architecture specification, there is a generic reference architecture and a MEC-in-NFV variant, we would like to discuss the MEC-in-NFV variant and the possibility of ONAP serving as the combined orchestrator (NFVO+MEAO). Also, given the rich functionality of various ONAP controllers, we would like to discuss how ONAP could possibly interface with both external MEPM-V components or alternatively subsume this functionality within ONAP. This is quite similar to how ONAP deals with VNFMs — they can be external or internal. There is no pre-planned agenda, and we would like to have an open discussion on this topic.

Please come by. Alternatively if you want to meet with me to understand our commercial ONAP distro or other services offerings, get in touch with us and we can set up some time.