The biggest news out of the recentOpen Networking Summit in Silicon Valley is that the Open Network Automation
Platform (ONAP) Project, which unites AT&T’s open source ECOMP and the Open
Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), has made substantive progress toward becoming a
dominant lifecycle service management platform for the telecom industry.
Senior executives from AT&T,
China Mobile and The Linux Foundation took the ONS stage to declare that ONAP
is not only a path towards more open, agile and cost effect carrier networks,
but it is perhaps The Path forward for the networks that support the majority
of the world’s mobile users. Besides AT&T (with 135 million mobile users)
and China Mobile (853 million), the ONAP project has attracted the endorsement,
support or commitment to early trials from other key operators including Orange
(265 million accesses), Bell, China Telecom, China Unicom and the hot, new
Reliance Jio in India. Together, these operators serve 38% of the global
wireless subscriber base. The Linux Foundation said they are already in
discussions with mobile operators representing a further 34% of the global
subscriber base, so clearly we are talking about enormous market clout.
The project description for ONAP
states that ONAP is an open source software platform that delivers capabilities
for the design, creation, orchestration, monitoring and life cycle management
of: low-level virtual network functions (VNFs); the carrier-scale software
defined networks (SDNs) that contain them; and higher-level services that
combine the above.
From a functionality point of view,
ONAP is expected to handle:
• Automated
onboarding.
• Automated
deployment.
• Automated
management.
• Intelligent
operation of network resources using big data and AI for policy optimisation.
The first vendors to announce ONAP
support include companies that worked with AT&T on its ECOMP and Domain 2.0
initiatives, including Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson and Metaswitch, along with key
suppliers for the OPEN-O project, which include Huawei, H3C and ZTE). However, with
this level of market momentum, expect all vendors to jump on board as quickly
as possible. As the ONAP technical steering committees get establish, now would
seem a good time to demonstrate enthusiasm and expertise in this new project.
A developer Wiki has already been
set-up (and can be accessed here: https://wiki.onap.org/), and the ONAP
governing board members have elected the individuals to serve in key roles,
while the governance structure was established via The Linux Foundation, with key
appointments including:
• Chair:
Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs.
• President: Yachen
Wang, deputy director of the Network Technology Department at China Mobile
Research Institute.
• Treasurer: Vincent
Danno, director wireline standards, Innovation Technical and Marketing at
Orange corporate.
How we got here
AT&T’s Enhanced Control,
Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform has been running in its
production network for the past two and half years. The company states that
ECOMP contains over 8 million lines of code and that over one hundred virtual
network functions are currently supported, including all of its VoLTE traffic.
The ECOMP capabilities are also multi-layer, with optical wavelengths
orchestrated by the system.
ECOMP was first publicly discussed
in depth by AT&T at ONS 2016 (March 2016), when John Donovan, the company’s
chief strategy office, described it as the ‘next big thing’. Donovan said ECOMP
was the most sophisticated software project that AT&T has ever undertaken.
ECOMP’s aim was to be the engine that powers its software-centric network, with
the goal of enabling high utilisation of network resources by combining
dynamic, policy-enforced functions for component and workload shaping,
placement, execution and administration. At the time, AT&T published its
ECOMP white paper, which has since attracted over 7,000 downloads.
In September 2016, Orange became
the first telecom company to join AT&T’s ECOMP effort. Orange agreed to
test the platform for creating and managing its own software-defined network.
The carriers also agreed to collaborate on open source and standardisation
initiatives to accelerate the standardisation of SDN and NFV. As the first
ECOMP partner, Orange perhaps played a critical role in persuading AT&T to
move ahead with the idea of contributing its 8 million lines of code to open
source. After all, there must have been many reasonable voices from within the
company advising against a new and risky strategy of giving away its intellectual
property, its crown jewels, for free. In December 2016, Bell Canada became the
second carrier to join the ECOMP team.
The OPEN-Orchestrator Project
(OPEN-O) was first announced at Mobile World Congress 2016. Its mission was to
develop the first open source software framework and orchestrator to enable
agile software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation
(NFV) operations. The initiative was driven by China Mobile and Huawei, with
early support from Brocade, China Telecom, DynaTrace, Ericsson, F5 Networks,
GigaSpaces, Infoblox, Intel, KT, Red Hat, Raisecom, Riverbed and ZTE. In
November 2016, OPEN-O launched its first major software release, codenamed SUN.
Many questions about what comes
next
With the agreement only just coming
into place and technical integration work yet to begin, it is too early to
forecast how other models will be impacted. Is it game over for other service
orchestration systems? Will other open networking projects, such as ONOS, Open
Daylight and OPNFV be redirected to become perfect fits into ONAP? How will
ETSI NFV evolve? And what of privately-developed orchestration systems, such as
BluePlanet?
Presumably these will also need to
adapt to the coming reality of a widely supported ONAP. On the other hand, will
one open orchestration system be able to fit all use cases and service
providers? And what about the public cloud providers?
The telcos are racing to make their
infrastructure hardware more like cloud data centres, while companies such as
AWS already have sophisticated software systems in place to bring up new
equipment, services and customers quickly and efficiently. From the cloud
operators perspective, will the 8 million lines of ONAP prove to be impressive?
If so, and if the majority of telcos really agree to this common service orchestration
model, will this give them an advantage over cloud operators?
Microsoft has already joined the
ONAP project, the only cloud provider to announce its membership in the group
so far. However, it is possible that a cloud provider like Google or Microsoft
could have a better orchestration system, and perhaps they could find a
business case to offer it on a wholesale basis.
