ONAP’s 6th Release, ‘Frankfurt,’ Available Now – Most Comprehensive, Secure and Collaborative Software to Accelerate 5G Deployments

Rich feature set including End-to-end 5G network slicing, security and deployment-ready automation anchored in Frankfurt
Collaborative and diverse contributions for 27 sub-projects, across 34 organizations and 400+ developers, and accelerated commercial activity
Increased implementation of standards – including 3GPP, ETSI, GSMA, MEF, TMF, and collaboration with Cloud Native, Edge, and Open RAN SC

SAN FRANCISCO – June 18, 2020 – LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, today announced the availability of the ONAP Frankfurt release. The most comprehensive ONAP release to date, the arrival of Frankfurt coincides with increased commercial activity, deployments into production, and community participation and diversity.

“ONAP has passed a critical tipping point in deployment and commercial adoption,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IOT, the Linux Foundation. “ONAP is now mainstream, and with Frankfurt, it brings major features and blueprints focused on scaling of global 5G deployments. I am incredibly proud of the community for collaborating to advance the future of networking, cloud native, edge a nd access.”

ONAP is a comprehensive platform for orchestration, management, and automation of network and edge computing services for network operators, cloud providers, and enterprises. It’s sixth release, Frankfurt, advances the march to 5G with end-to-end 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, and more. 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.

“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.

Commercial Deployments

Bell Canada was the first to use ONAP’s first release, Amsterdam, into production in 2017. They have now automated a significant amount of manual configuration, recovery and provision work in their network by using ONAP in production across multiple use cases. More details on Bell’s ONAP journey are available in a new case study.

A recent survey of the LFN End User Advisory Group (EUAG) revealed that over one quarter of respondents have already deployed ONAP into production with another 19 percent planning to do so. A new whitepaper has been published by the EUAG detailing these findings as well as provides options and analysis of various consumption models. Another survey of the ONAP community revealed that 17 percent of respondents had ONAP in production currently with the other 83 percent planning to move ONAP to production in two years or less.

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.

Additional Updates

The OPNFV Verification Program (OVP)—which combines open source-based automated compliance and verification testing for cloud stack specifications established by ONAP, multiple SDOs, and the LFN EUAG—has now granted two new badges for VNFs, the first to ULAK Communications, the second to Affirmed Networks. In addition, 12 products have now received the NFVI “Infrastructure” badge. The next phase of OVP will enhance this effort with badges for cloud native telecom platforms and CNFs.

The Linux Foundation is pleased to support four online learning courses for ONAP (both free and paid options). In Q3 of this year, the Certified ONAP Professional exam will be launched. The exam is the product of many months of work to identify the core domains and the critical skills, knowledge and competencies necessary for ONAP including Service Design, Service Deployment, Service LCM, Troubleshooting, and Control Loop Automation. The Beta program is accepting registrations until July 31. Learn more about ONAP training and the exam.

On June 18th at 9:00 AM Pacific Time, the LFN Webinar Series will host a special webinar dedicated to the release: What’s New in ONAP Frankfurt presented by ONAP expert Amar Kapadia. Register here for live and on-demand viewing.

Looking Ahead

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.

The LFN community will host a virtual LFN Developer & Testing Forum June 22-25 to collaborate and engage across projects and groups, including ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight Tungsten Fabric, and CNTT. More details, including registration information, are available here: https://wiki.lfnetworking.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=34604523.

The Open Networking & Edge Summit (ONES), the industry’s premier open networking event now expanded to comprehensively cover Edge Computing, Edge Cloud & IoT takes place virtually, September 28-29. ONES enables collaborative development and innovation across enterprises, service providers/telcos and cloud providers to shape the future of networking and edge computing. Register today: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/register/

Resources:

Support for ONAP Frankfurt

“The Frankfurt release marks another important milestone in the evolution of the ONAP platform,” said Chris Rice, Senior Vice President, Network Infrastructure and Cloud, AT&T. “The continued emphasis on security and stability in Frankfurt ensures carriers have the confidence to use ONAP as the basis of their network automation platforms and the improvements in ease-of-use and user experience make it simpler than ever for new carriers to adopt. The focus on O-RAN and 3GPP alignment in this release means ONAP is well-positioned to support 5G deployments around the world.”

“As its deployment accelerates, ONAP Frankurt regards 5G as the primary target. It provides the first open-source implementation of automatic E2E slicing orchestration.” Dr. Feng Junlan, Chief Scientist of China Mobile Research Institute and General Manager of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Operation Center, pointed out, “Looking forward, to handle the management challenges brought about by the complexity of the 5G network itself and the diversity in industry customers requirements, further advancing network automation based on AI empowerment has become the next focal point. It would be our dearest hope that ONAP continues to strengthen cooperation with LF-Edge and LF AI, as well as external standardization organizations, to jointly contribute to an open, shared, and win-win platform for technology innovation to enable network intelligence.”

“As an open-source champion, Fujitsu is honored to contribute our modeling and software expertise to the ONAP community,” said Rod Naphan, head of the Technology Business Unit at Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. “The MDONS blueprint that Fujitsu co-developed for the Frankfurt release brings new optical service orchestration capabilities, further enhancing multi-layer cross-carrier network operations through the ONAP platform.”

“We are very pleased with the achievements of the ONAP community in the Frankfurt release, a true testimony of open collaboration in the industry. Nokia continued to further enhance its network functions integration with ONAP, in particular 5G radio integration, to smooth the path for future network rollouts. Other areas of focus for Nokia in the Frankfurt release include Plug’n’Play capabilities “from power-up to on-air,” enhancing ONAP security with support for distribution of certificates generated by external servers, and ONAP’s harmonisation with 3GPP, ORAN, and ETSI NFV. We’re proud to be part of this active community,” said Jonne Soininen, head of Open Source Initiatives, Nokia Bell Labs & CTO.

“Orange confirmed its strong commitment to build a vibrant Open Source networking ecosystem that will fasten the network automation adoption in production and improve interoperability,” said Emmanuel Bidet, vice president of Orange Labs Networks on Core Networks, Automation and Security. “Orange has dramatically increased its involvement in ONAP becoming a top 3 contributor. Orange is still offering some lab resources to help the end users to discover and use ONAP through the community Openlab or to increase the release trustability thanks to several CI/CD labs. Leading two main projects (Integration and Installation), Orange is developing and maintaining advanced CI chains and complex test suites including security tests in order to facilitate the ONAP adoption in production. Aligned with Orange strategy to deploy ONAP for WAN based services, Orange is also involved in the MDONS use-case. Orange is also contributing to CNF integration and more widely to improve ONAP Cloud Readiness. Finally Orange is contributing to CDS to make sure that xNF smart automation promises become reality. Orange is looking forward to contributing to the Guilin Release, continuing the journey towards a full cloud-native platform. We are fully convinced that ONAP is a key component to bring added value to our network’s solutions.”

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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