Second ONAP Release Enables Deployment-Ready Platform for Network Automation and Orchestration

SAN FRANCISCO, June 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project, which delivers a unified platform for end-to-end, closed-loop network automation, today announced the availability of ONAP Beijing, its second software release. The Beijing release accelerates ease of ONAP deployment for modern network operators and comes as more leading global service providers commit to enhancing open source networking.  LFNetworking– a Linux Foundation entity that brings together six top networking projects (including ONAP) to increase harmonization across platforms, communities and ecosystems– now enables more than 65 percent of the world's mobile subscribers, as well as major global enterprises and cloud providers serving hundreds of millions of customers.

"We are delighted to announce the availability of ONAP's second release, Beijing, which advances the architecture, seven dimensions of deployability, and new automation functionality," said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, The Linux Foundation. "As a community, we celebrate the progress the Beijing release brings to the ecosystem and look forward to additional deployments of the platform."

With ONAP's Beijing release, the developer community has focused closely on new platform and process enhancements to ensure scalability, security, stability and performance in support of real-world deployments. The release also evolves the platform toward container-based implementations, and provides robust documentation and training for Virtual Network Functions (VNF) developers, service designers, and operations managers. Leading developers from solution providers, vendors and system integrators globally have laid the foundations of a robust commercial ecosystem.

"The Beijing release ushers in the next phase of ONAP," said Mazin Gilbert, ONAP Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Chair, and Vice President, Advanced Technology, AT&T Labs. "The technical enhancements in this release focus on enhancing the stability and deployability of the platform. In addition, the community has focused on supporting users in their adoption journey with the delivery of several new GettingStarted guides as well as online and in-person introductory training options. Together with the community, we are further establishing ONAP as the defacto standard for automation."

Specific platform and feature enhancements of the Beijing release include:

• Architecture:
• ONAP Operations Manager supports the migration to microservices-based deployments on Kubernetes
• ONAP has collaborated with MEF and TMForum on external APIs, ensuring those frameworks and APIs can communicate seamlessly with the ONAP platform.
• Deployability:
• Starting with the Beijing release, the ONAP development process measures improvements in seven key operational parameters (Usability, Security, Manageability, Stability, Scalability, Performance and Resiliency) for each platform module.
• The Beijing release brings advanced platform stability and resiliency based on deployment of of the ONAP OperationsManager (OOM) and the Multi-Site State Coordination Service (MUSIC) projects.
• ONAP OOM enables ONAP modules to be run on Kubernetes, contributing to availability, resilience, scalability and more for ONAP deployments and sets the stage for full implementation of a microservices architecture, expected with the third release, Casablanca.
• MUSIC is an optional new solution for state management of ONAP components across geographically distributed sites, ensuring federated active-active operation without degrading performance, reliability and availability.
• As security is a key element of the CI framework, the Project has adopted CII (Core Infrastructure Initiative) badging as part of its release requirements. CII is a project managed by The Linux Foundation that collaboratively works to improve the security and resilience of critical open source projects.
• Functional Enhancements - Blueprint Enrichment
• The residential vCPE blueprint has been enriched with change management and policy-driven workload placement features that include hardware platform awareness (HPA).
• Network service scaling to meet traffic needs is a fundamental NFV value proposition. VNF Manual Scaleout is also supported on vLB via APPC and Policy with LCM based Manual Scale Out.

Ecosystem Expansion:

• The open source community is rapidly organizing to ensure the technology, tools and services are in place to support rapid adoption.
• VNF integration: With the Beijing release, the ONAP community worked closely with the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP), which  simplifies adoption in commercial NFV products and establishes an industry threshold based on OPNFV capabilities and test cases, to coordinate integrations via the ONAP VNFSDK and ONAP VNF Validation Program (VVP) components.
• Documentation and training:
• New startup and operations guides for users
• Design guides and API and SDK documentation for service designers and VNF developers
• Online training: Free introductory courses on Open Source Networking Technologies and ONAP as well as more in-depth, paid ONAP Fundamentals training
• Community-led best-practices webinars
• Real-World Use
• Organizations spanning every aspect of the ecosystem (vendors, telecommunication providers, cable and cloud operators, NFV vendors and solution providers) continue to leverage ONAP for commercial products and services. The Beijing release code is being integrated into new and existing proofs of concept and  production deployment plans for large global carriers like AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, China Telecom, Orange, Reliance Jio, Verizon, Vodafone, Turk Telecom, among others. And major leading vendors are building products and solutions on the ONAP platform.

Fore more details on the ONAP Beijing release, please visit https://onap.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release/index.html.

ONAP Developer Forum
The ONAP project is hosting a developer forum in preparation of the third release, Casablanca (coming this summer), which will take place in Beijing, China, June 19-22, 2018. Additional details and registration details can be found here.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Additional Resources
Download ONAP Beijing 
Architecture Overview 
Getting Started Guide 
OOM Solution Brief 
VoLTE Solution Brief 
vCPE Solution Brief 
Related videos 
ONAP Blog 
Join as a Member

Media Contact
Jill Lovato
The Linux Foundation
[email protected]

Comments From Organizations Deploying ONAP

"As one of the founding creators of and leading code contributors to ONAP, we're thrilled to see this strong and growing developer ecosystem continue to advance the platform," said Chris Rice, LF Networking Board Chairman and Senior Vice President of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T. "All service providers and network operators will benefit from the second software release, Beijing, which is focused closely on enhancing the platform to ensure scalability, security, stability and performance in support of real world deployments. As the 5G era approaches, software-centric network automation will be key to meeting customer expectations and driving new capabilities into the network."

"China Mobile is committed to implementing network transformation technology innovation based on the ONAP open source community. We are very pleased to see that after the basic functional verification of the Amsterdam version of the core network virtualization business scenario, the community version of Beijing has been enhanced with respect to stability, reliability, and security," said Yachen Wang, Deputy General Manager, AI and Intelligent Operation R&D Center, Network and IT Technology Department, China Mobile. "We will select core modules based on the Beijing version to conduct customized product R&D for key CMCC application scenarios. At the same time, we will continue to invest resources in supporting community work. In particular, the jointly-developed SDN and NFV-enabled cloud network collaborative orchestration business scenarios to enhance functionality and verification, contributing to the widespread deployment of ONAP."

"As a platinum member, China Telecom has witnessed and participated in the successful deployment of ONAP's Amsterdam release. Thanks to member collaboration, the Beijing release is now available and includes progress in Security, Stability, Scalability and Performance," said Dr. Sun Qiong, SDN Technology R&D Center Director of China Telecom Beijing Research Inst., and LFN Board member, China Telecom.  "Based on the ONAP Architectural Principles, Beijing will accelerate the policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions, and expand the platform's maturity. China Telecom has endeavored and will continuously work hard together with other LFN members to to develop the top global automation platform in a software-defined, virtualized era."

"The ONAP Beijing release brings the maturity of the platform to a new stage, providing a very good reference for carrier network transformation and service  automation," said Dr. Xiongyan Tang, chief scientist, China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute. "As an innovative leader in China's telecommunications industry, China Unicom has always been committed to uniting industry partners, accelerating network innovation, enabling business development and prospering the whole industry ecosystem. We will continue to participate in developer activities within the LFN community and within our network, to help enable growth across the industry."

Mats Karlsson, Head of solution area OSS at Ericsson says "Ericsson is one of the leading promoters of open source ecosystem, accelerating the adoption and industry alignment in key technology areas including ONAP and ETSI – NFV alignment to benefit customers and partners.  As part of Ericsson's collaboration and deep involvement in many open source projects, we see automation with orchestration playing a vital role in the evolution of 5G networks. ONAP is a key enabler of 5G evolution bringing automation based on analytics, policy and orchestration across legacy & hybrid cloud environments. The Beijing release takes substantial step forward in platform security, scalability, stability, enhanced exposure capabilities, and deployable on both virtual machine and container/kubernetes infrastructures. This release also demonstrated Virtual CPE and Virtual VoLTE use cases."

"The ONAP Beijing Release focuses on increasing the stability, reliability, security and performance of the platform, it is a key milestone for ONAP's commercial deployment," said Bill Ren, vice president, Network & Industry Ecosystem Development, Huawei. "With 5G and network cloudification, automation and intelligence are more important to the telecommunications industry than ever before. Because of its advanced architecture and concepts, Huawei believes that ONAP is an industry platform more suitable for global operator network automation, but ONAP's maturity requires more consensus and collaboration in the upstream and downstream in the industries. Huawei will work with its carrier partners to conduct a joint POC of the 2B service scenario based on the Beijing Release, and promote ONAP to commercial deployment as soon as possible."

"Netsia is fully committed to ONAP and actively participating in the OSAM project for the Casablanca release," said Bora Eliacik, VP of Engineering, Netsia. "We intend to take this into production at a leading service provider in Turkey."

Marc Rouanne, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, says: "As top 10 contributor to the Beijing release, Nokia is an active member in the ONAP community and we continue to collaborate with community members to advance standard interfaces and system modularity in support of our customers' varying needs. Integration with external controllers represents a significant step forward for an open and expandable automation platform, and is a key result of this collaboration. Nokia also supports recent ONAP directions towards virtual and physical network and service operations automation. Comprehensive automation strategies are critical for fast moving, hybrid network, digital services environments."

"Designed using best-in-class micro-service architecture and following the best practice criteria for open source software, the ONAP Beijing Release provides a reliable and operable platform. It includes a set of powerful VNF packaging and validation tools that provides a common framework, easing VNF on-boarding and reducing the integration load," said Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon, Senior Vice President of Orange Labs Networks. "Aligned with the internal network transformation program towards network softwaritisation, Orange is very active in the community with 20+ contributors for the Beijing Release. Orange developed 3 APIs aligned with TMF to facilitate integration within existing IT and BSS applications: External API/NorthBound Interface for service order, catalogue and inventory. To promote ONAP usage and to provide more testing capabilities, Orange proposes an Openlab platform used by 70+ users (from operators, vendors and academic) to demonstrate the full ONAP framework capabilities and to share results with the community."

"We are excited to see the growing ONAP developer community and the strong interest from leading  Communication Service Providers (CSPs) across the globe," said Arunmozhi Balasubramanian, Senior VP, Network Services – Solutions & Strategy, Tech Mahindra. "Tech Mahindra is among the top five contributors of ONAP. Tech Mahindra is executing a number of ONAP PoCs (Proof of Concepts) with leading CSPs across Americas, Europe and ANZ (Australia and New Zealand). The Beijing release provides support for PNFs (Physical Network Functions) which paves the way for easier migration to next- gen service management. ONAP enables CSPs to realize the much needed Service Agility and Hyper Automation for their networks."

SOURCE ONAP

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