ETSI Open Source MANO launches Release TEN, celebrates OSM 5th anniversary

Since Open Source MANO was launched, the community has grown from 30 initial members to over 145 organisations to date. The number of ETSI OSM solutions running in production networks keeps growing, confirming the value of multi-vendor network services orchestrated by standards-based solutions.

Release TEN defines an inflection point in OSM evolution, shifting the main goal from the implementation of a vision to the operation of production deployments. To support this new phase, Mark Shuttleworth, one of the project founders, and member of the OSM Technical Steering Committee since OSM Release ZERO, has been appointed Senior Advisor for Ecosystem Development and Strategic Direction, and will continue to contribute with his vast experience and vision to the success of future OSM Releases.

“The pace and quality of VNF and CNF onboarding in our latest community event is a measure of the need that OSM addresses in the fast-moving telco operations revolution,” said Mark Shuttleworth. “With these proof points behind us, we must now face the challenge of production operations, and I am excited to be part of that next phase of OSM.”

The co-operation agreement recently signed between ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance is a new and significant step towards positioning OSM as the optimised open solution for the Service Management and Orchestration Framework.

This new OSM Release brings, among other improvements, a new design that allows OSM modules to be decoupled and distributed across the network for higher resilience, facilitating edge and geo-redundant deployments. In addition, OSM Release TEN extends its support of options for public and hybrid cloud deployments with a new connector for Microsoft Azure. This fulfils the promise of orchestrating all major VIMs including OpenStack, OpenVIM, VMWare, Amazon Web Services and Eclipse fog05, as well as Kubernetes clusters.

Release TEN also brings an important number of optimisations, based on the experience collected from live deployments. This 'feedback loop' is extremely important to remain aligned with real world requirements and is a high priority for the OSM Community.

New features in OSM Release TEN:

• Distributed VNF Configuration and Abstraction, allowing Network Function management to be implemented in a distributed fashion, offering better resiliency for failure scenarios and improving MEC and Geo-Redundant deployments.
• Microsoft Azure support, providing additional options for public cloud and hybrid deployments.
• Juju operational dashboard fully integrated with the user interface that gives operators a real time view of the status of day-1 and day-2 operations, and provides immediate feedback after executing an action without the need to interact with the command line.
• Additional Subscription Management tools using OSM Northbound API, based on ETSI NFV-SOL 005, to facilitate the integration of third-party Operations Support Systems. 
• Enhanced alarm management allowing users to have better visibility and interaction with alarms registered in OSM.
• Reduced artifact footprint: OSM Release TEN container images are on average 50% smaller than in previous versions. Version management of dependencies has also been significantly improved.
• An improved Scale-in/Scale-out functionality is now available from the graphical user interface and optimises resource management and energy efficiency, targeting Kubernetes applications as well.

OSM in action

The latest OSM#11 Hackfest was fully dedicated to Network Function onboarding. Close to 100 participants organised in several teams, collaborated over the course of a week to achieve the onboarding of the virtual or containerised network functions of their choice with OSM Release TEN. At the end of the week, the teams showcased the full onboarding and day 1 / day 2 operation of a wide range of proprietary and Open-Source Network Functions such as FreeRadius, PowerDNS, Asterisk, and UPC UA.

The teams provided valuable feedback to the OSM community and demonstrated several interesting use cases, such as a live call and the end-to-end deployment of a MEC System with service registration and discovery based on ETSI MEC011 specification. Congratulations to all!