Part of working in open source means following a number of open standards and participating in a number of open source projects in order to look for opportunities to make upstream contributions. While not as direct as working in proprietary silos, we’ve always looked to open source as many contributions as possible; not only for Aarna’s benefit, but for the benefit of the community and our partners aligning to the same standards and projects. In this blog, I will give a quick overview of the ETSI SOL005 interface support that was upstreamed to the Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) open source EMCO project and our AMCOP product

What is the ETSI SOL005 standard? 

SOL005 is part of the standards defined by ETSI NFV industry standards group, and defines Interfaces related to Network Service Management and VNF onboarding towards OSS/BSS (Operations Support System / Business Support System) fulfilling the requirements defined in ETSI NFV IFA013

We decided to implement a subset of SOL005 in AMCOP which is limited to Lifecycle management, Subscription, Notification, and fault management APIs. This is to make sure we can support a wide range of applications (OSS/BSS) from our customers or partners who would like to interface their products with AMCOP. 

The SOL005 is layered on the EMCO component of AMCOP. EMCO (Edge Multi-Cluster Orchestrator) is one of the components of AMCOP, which is an open source project under the umbrella of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN). EMCO is a universal control plane and application orchestrator for Kubernetes. EMCO acts as a framework for intent-based deployment of cloud native applications to sets of Kubernetes clusters, spanning enterprise data centers, multiple cloud service providers, and multiple edge locations.

We at Aarna have been an active member of the EMCO community, and contributed several features to the EMCO code base. The SOL005 layer has been contributed upstream, and it has been integrated into Aarna’s AMCOP product since the last major release (version 3.3). 

The following diagram gives an overview of how SOL005 is implemented on AMCOP/EMCO.  

The architectural objectives of the SOL005 interface is to provide a standardized interface for OSS/BSS software, to perform the following: 

  • Orchestrate Network Services consisting of Cloud-native and Virtual Network Functions
  • Perform LCM operations of Network Services
  • Fault Management of Network Services
  • (Roadmap) Performance Management of Network Services
  • (Roadmap) Capacity Management of NFVI (Kubernetes)

For example, one of our partners uses SOL005 interface to integrate their software with AMCOP, which acts as an NFVO (NFV Orchestration), to orchestrate 5G network services and workloads that are cloud native or virtualized. 

The SOL005 code is all upstream now in the EMCO repositories. 

https://gitlab.com/project-emco/core/emco-base  

https://gitlab.com/project-emco/ecosystem/solsvc

Please let us know if you have any questions by contacting us here.