Highlights from the Virtual LFN Developer & Testing Forum, June 22-25, 2020.
Please direct any questions to info@lfnetworking.org.
Overview
LF Networking (LFN) held its biannual Developer & Testing Forum from June 22-25, 2020 in support of the LFN technical communities. Given restrictions around the COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time, the event was held virtually (the previous event was held in Prague). The online format enabled more community members to participate than ever before with 623 registrants and 512 attendees (over 82% attendance) participating in 97 sessions. A record 88% of survey respondents were satisfied with the event rating it a 4 or 5 (out of 5).
The key LFN projects and initiatives represented at the event were the CNTT, ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, and Tungsten Fabric. High-level summaries of these separate tracks and a dedicated cross-community track are described below. You can see the event session details, presentations, and notes on this wiki page.
CNTT
The Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce (CNTT) was established in 2019 as a partnership between LF Networking and GSMA to provides standardized infrastructures for both virtual machine-based and containerized network functions, enabling providers to shorten onboarding from weeks and months to hours and days, reducing costs, and accelerating digital transformation. The CNTT community members discussed a wide range of topics shown below. Many of the discussions were jointly conducted with the OPNFV community and are listed in the cross-community section below:
Networking and Security
- RA1 (based on OpenStack) security documentation
- SDN solutions and relevant northbound interfaces for CNTT
- Add network model details to CNTT documentation
Upcoming Baraque Release Planning
- Review of each workstream
- Selection criteria for the next OpenStack release
- OpenStack Cyborg project as a way to enable hardware acceleration
Reference Architecture 2 (Based on Kubernetes) Planning
- Implementing and testing a CNF
- State and roadmap of RI2; getting RI2 up and running with CI/CD
- RC2 deep dive
Other Topics
- Edge cloud requirements and how to accommodate them in CNTT
- Marketing topics to spread awareness and recruit new members
OPNFV reduces time to integrate and deploy NFV infrastructure and onboard VNF/CNFs for those who supply components and those who operationalize these platforms. The OPNFV community does this by implementing, testing and deploying tools for conformance and performance of NFV infrastructure, aligned with industry reference architectures.
OPNFV develops, tests, and provides the NFV infrastructure for CNTT so the bulk of the OPNFV activity is captured in the cross-community section. OPNFV specific activity included:
Cloud Native & New Projects:
- New project proposal: Keel for CNTT RI2 implementation
- Multi-interface container network benchmarking in VSPERF
- Common Infrastructure Realization & Validation (CIRV) project updates
ONAP is a comprehensive platform for orchestration, management, and automation of network and edge computing services for network operators, cloud providers, and enterprises. The ONAP community conducted a large number of sessions that covered topics such as:
Planning for the Upcoming Guilin Release
- Streamlining requirements collection for a given release
- Requirements prioritization by the TSC
- Nine non-functional requirements
- Multitenancy and other functional enhancements
- Dedicated project planning for Policy, OOM, K8s plugin, control loop, SDC, and more
Operational Readiness
- Open source license compliance for every ONAP docker image
- More number of integrations per given amount of time with more CI testing
- Best practices for updating software components
- Documentation improvements
- Service mesh for RBAC and security
- Writing tests with the Robot framework
5G and Cloud Native
- 5G and PNF use case review
- Notification collection esp. as standardized by 3GPP
- End-to-end network slicing
- 5G SON use case
- Configuration and Persistency Service
- 5G CNF, vFW CNF orchestration
- Reference CNF development
- CNF orchestration through ONAP
Other Topics
- Review of 6 modeling topics
- Python ONAP SDK for accessing services
- EUAG operator survey and in-depth analysis on the consumption model
- Frankfurt post-mortem
- More rapid release cadence
- O-RAN-SC A1 adapter in ONAP
- Automating OOM with Ansible
OpenDaylight (ODL), the most widely adopted open source SDN controller, is a modular open platform for customizing and automating networks of any size and scale. The ODL topics ranged from:
New Initiatives
- The status and next steps around ODL micro-distributions that contain smaller sets of modules suitable for narrow use cases
- Handling platform API changes
- LFN infrastructure migration and ODL release cycles improvements
- New project: Service Automation Framework (SAF) leverages workflow concepts to simplify service provisioning
Functionality and Roadmap Review
- Review of different ODL projects, roadmap planning for upcoming Aluminum and Silicon releases
- TransportPCE new functionalities introduced in the prior Magnesium release
- ODL BGPCEP project reliability and scale; Magnesium release retrospective and roadmap for the Aluminum release
- Review of ODL usability
Tungsten Fabric (TF) is a multi-cloud multistack SDN controller featuring cloud-grade networking and security. The TF community discussed the following:
Future Planning & New Initiatives
- Future roadmap and release planning
- Making TF cloud native
- Moving to upstream DPDK for TF
- vRouter performance improvements
- OpenStack with multiple Kubernetes clusters
Cross-Community
The active collaboration between the different LFN project communities creates additional value beyond the separate project communities, e.g. the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Highlights of this cross-community teamwork are as follows.
CNTT/OPNFV Collaboration Discussions
- Performance testing
- OPNFV Functest test case traceability analysis for CNTT RA1/RC1
- Updates on CNTT Baldy release field trials
- OPNFV/CNTT release process and synchronization
- Functional Management Organization (FMO) model for OPNFV/CNFF
Additional Collaboration Discussions
- Aligning XGVela, the new Linux Foundation cloud native PaaS project with LFN projects
- Recruiting more LFN developers
- Shift to a more agile release cycle
- Integration points between various LFN projects
- Status of OVP and OVP 2.0 roadmap for CNF verification
- Collaboration between open source and standards around testing
- TF integration with ONAP
What’s Next
Please join us for the Open Networking & Edge Summit being held virtually from September 28-30 and two days of LFN Technical Meetings being held in mid-October (dates TBD). Additional information on the technical meetings will be made on this wiki page and respective project mailing lists. Please direct any questions to info@lfnetworking.org.
