As a cornerstone of LF Networking, Anuket continues to play a vital role in defining and implementing telecom cloud infrastructure architecture and testing standards. Despite facing resource constraints, the project has made significant strides in 2024. Below is the full Anuket Project Update, as featured in the LF Networking 2024 Annual Report, highlighting its key achievements, challenges, and future plans.
LFN Project Updates: Anuket
Anuket, the LFN telecom cloud infrastructure architecture modeling and testing project, continues its mission to meet operator requirements for normalization, software, and test development environments. The project completed its Pieman release in the first half of 2024 and plans to release its Quinnipiac release in December.
Due to continuing significant resource constraints over the past years, only two specification sub-projects (RM and RA2) and two implementation and test projects are active (Thoth and Functest). In the last months of 2024, the project has issues even to reach quorum in its TSC meetings. Anuket projects and work streams focused on strengthening container-based open infrastructure specifications and implementations.
Some of other active projects include:
- Thoth – The team is working on making data sets available for AI model and application development by focusing on novel data anonymization techniques.
- Functest, functest-kubernetes — A suite of functional tests for OpenStack and Kubernetes deployments, now includes support for CNTi Testsuite.
The project continued its vital work and launched the Pieman Release on May 24, 2024. Anuket is being adopted as the reference infrastructure for other open source projects such as Sylva, as well as part of the GSMA permanent document Reference Model as NG.126, Reference Architecture 2 (Kubernetes based) as NG.139, and Reference Architecture 1 (OpenStack based) as NG.133.
Reference Model (RM) highlights include:
- Updated contents in Hardware Infrastructure Manager section, aligning and referencing the Redfish standard. Prior to Pieman, Hardware Infrastructure Manager existed in RM as a concept only. Now, it can be implemented, e.g., using ODIM as a basis.
- Added load balancer into RM technology agnostic definition, aligned to RA2 PR #3415. It is based on a functional description, not on a specific implementation as typical load balancer technologies are defined.
- Started a technology agnostic guidance section to assist in planning more efficient open source based cloud infrastructure energy consumption. The RM focus is on the energy efficiency of the workload/ infrastructure/management interactions. Energy savings are becoming a major issue for the telecom industry, with the massive use of data, energy efficiency and sustainability in the Hybrid, Multi-Cloud environment needs a consolidated approach by the ecosystem players.
- Added section on automated TLS certificate lifecycle management for workloads (from the infrastructure perspective).
Reference Architecture 2 (RA2)
The RA2 project focuses on building a Kubernetes based architecture that has now been consolidated into the most comprehensive industry wide set of specifications for Kubernetes Telco Cloud – acceptance as a GSMA standard is confirming this status。
- Added Express Data Path (AF_XDP) network acceleration specs, enabling faster and more efficient data plane traffic processing. This provides an agreed network acceleration implementation, which benefits all users with containerised data plane functions.
- Update to Kubernetes 1.29, including API specs and new functionality. Since PaaS services are essential operational add-ons to Kubernetes, which implement containerised network function monitoring, logging, traffic steering, etc.
- Add cert-manager for TLS certificate lifecycle management. A number of network functions require TLS certificates, this plugin allows management of their lifecycle automatically
- Add Load Balancer specs, for ingress traffic distribution across microservices. Load balancers steer traffic across the pods that compose containerised network functions. RA2 is specifying what is required of a load balancer to integrate with a Kubernetes based Telco cloud.
What Worked in 2024
Anuket projects and work streams continued their efforts to strengthen container-based open infrastructure specifications and implementations. We were able to take advantage of the LFN Intern program and had a successful collaboration with an intern from India who was able to help the project with several document migration and clean up efforts.
Next Steps and Decisions
- Need to drive more support from within LFN and larger Telecom community
- Need to continue the review of the health of sub-projects
Authored by Beth Cohen, TSC Co-chair, and Software Defined Networking Product Technologist at Verizon, and Gergely Csatari, TSC Co-chair, and Senior Specialist, Open Source at Nokia.
Learn More in the Full Report
The LF Networking 2024 Annual Report dives deeper into the progress and challenges of Anuket and other LFN projects. Discover how open source is shaping the future of telecom cloud infrastructure. Read the full report here.
