LF Networking (LFN) announced the availability of ONAP Frankfurt, the sixth major release of the open network automation platform for orchestration, management, and automation of network and edge computing services for network operators, cloud providers, and enterprises.
Key capabilities in the Frankfurt release include advances in 5G network slicing, integration with O-RAN, orchestration and management of multi-cloud cloud native network functions (CNFs), and cloud native applications across multiple Kubernetes clouds. Frankfurt also introduces new functionality and makes considerable advances in S3P (stability, security, scalability, performance), and deeper alignment with Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs). Additionally, the release coincides with continued commercial activity and deployments to production across the industry via a vibrant technical community with participation from 34 organizations and 400+ developers.
The Frankfurt release also brings a blueprint for Multi-Domain Optical Network Service (MDONS) for L0/L1 optical service automation.
“It is during the most challenging of times that the ONAP Community shows its true strength,” said Catherine Lefevre, AVP-Network Cloud and SDN Platform Integration, AT&T and chair of ONAP Technical Steering Committee. “I am continually impressed by the amazing work we put forth every day and how we are making a difference across the Industry. It is an incredible collective effort between carriers, vendors and cloud providers. We have all been working incredibly hard these last few months to make the Frankfurt release happen.”
Release Highlights:
- 5G support — Frankfurt includes support for end-to-end 5G service orchestration and network slicing, greater alignment with the O-RAN specification, and other enhancements. Developed in collaboration with SDOs such as 3GPP (see more details below), this feature positions ONAP as a comprehensive, vendor agnostic platform for 5G automation.
- Standards harmonization — Frankfurt advances alignment with ETSI vis-a-vis SOL002, SOL003, SOL004, SOL005 specifications; 3GPP in the areas of network slicing, fault/performance/configuration management; TM Forum on additional northbound APIs; and O-RAN software community in terms of the O1 interface. These harmonization efforts mean greater deployment readiness.
- Commercial deployments are easier — Frankfurt brings better deployment readiness through major improvements in the continuous integration (CI) process, bringing stability, speed of innovation, and security:
- CI — Frankfurt introduces the capability to run automated testing in response to new patch submissions. Since January, the patch submission process has resulted in ~4,000 ONAP installations and ~70,000 automated test suites. In addition, the integration team has defined five test categories, test APIs, and a test database.
- Security — Almost every ONAP project made progress on key security issues such as converting ports to https, removal of hard coded passwords, running K8s pods with non-root privileges, and reducing security vulnerabilities (CVE)s. Numerous open source dependencies were upgraded, such as Java 8 to Java 11.
- Cloud native deployments are easier — Significant security and flexibility improvements made to the OOM project include security enhancements and the ability for ONAP to be deployed in any Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) environment, thus increasing the move towards cloud.
- Major new functionality — Frankfurt supports self service control loops that allows designers to completely define new control loops without having to wait for an official ONAP release; Controller Design Studio (CDS) integrated to control loops; Configuration & Persistency Service supports saving 5G/O-RAN configuration data. This release also includes a new use case blueprints: Multi-Domain Optical Network Service (MDONS) for L0/L1 optical service automation and enhanced blueprints for 5G and CCVPN.
The next ONAP release, ‘Guilin,’ is planned for 2H of 2020 and will further increase the support for 5G in areas of network slicing and O-RAN integration, ETSI (e.g. SOL007) and 3GPP standards, as well as the cloud native journey including deeper integration with K8s. The release after Guilin is codenamed Honolulu.
More details on Frankfurt—including new functionalities, blueprints, and 5G use cases—are available via the links provided below. To learn more about ONAP Frankfurt, please visit https://www.onap.org/software
