By Beth Cohen, CNTT Technical Editor, SDN Product Manager at Verizon
You know what they say — the third time is the charm — and with that said, CNTT (Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce) is announcing that it has just delivered its third release in a bit over a year. The new release has some significant new content, the Hardware Infrastructure Manager.
The Hardware Infrastructure Manager is a new component introduced as part of the reference model that addresses the gap that there are no common sets of Hardware Infrastructure Managers on the market or in any Open Source community that can handle multiple equipment vendor environments in a way that is not tightly connected to a specific Virtualization/Containerization Infrastructure. The Model also envisages the use of multiple SDN controllers working on different levels, and finally allows for direct management access (e.g. from the Orchestration layer) into the hardware infrastructure layer if this is done via the open and standardized Hardware Infrastructure Manager.
Translated into English, this means that the reference model will support increased hardware disaggregation, yet still be able to support the specialized purpose-built hardware components needed to support telecom networking workloads.
Other new additions include refinements to the definition of the project scope, more details on the reference architecture for containerized workloads (RA2), expansions of the implementation and security sections, and the beginnings of changes needed to make the overall document support Edge workloads. More details on what changed can be found here: https://wiki.lfnetworking.org/display/LN/Baraque+Release+Highlights
Special thanks goes out to all the contributors that made this all possible, especially, Pankaj Goyal and Walter Kozlowski for leading the technical charge overall, Cedric Ollivier for pushing the actual release in GitHub and last, but by no means least, thanks to Gergely Csatari for doing the heavy lifting of migrating all the CNTT content to readthedocs found at https://cntt.readthedocs.io/en/stable-baraque/ for your reading pleasure.
The work is never done, so in that spirit, we have already started working on Elbrus, named after the highest mountain in Europe, continuing our theme of reaching new heights with each new release. I encourage you, if you have any interest in setting the infrastructure reference standards for telecom workloads, whether you are coming from an operator or vendor, all are welcome, so please join us in building on this great foundation. More information on how you can participate can be found here: https://wiki.lfnetworking.org/display/LN/Getting+Started
