OPNFV Crosses Into MANO With Danube

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Open Networking Summit -- The OPNFV Project took a big step up its evolutionary ladder with this week's release of Danube, which now supports Management and Orchestration (MANO) across end-to-end open networking stacks.

Danube is OPNFV's fourth release and it's the most comprehensive to date. Aside of support for MANO via work with Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) , it also includes DevOps methodologies for NFV by collaborating on upstream development, integration, deployment and continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) testing automation. (See OPNFV Issues Danube Software Release.)

"In general, what we do is build a set of end-to-end stacks for NFV," said OPNFV Director Heather Kirksey during an interview at ONS. "With our first three releases, the stacks we were assembling where very much NFVi and VIM (based) because you need to build your infrastructure. In this release we integrated MANO for the first time. We integrated with OPEN-O so we can really start pointing to a full end-to-end stack with MANO, with the infrastructure."

Specifically, Danube includes integration between the NFV Infrastructure/Virtual Infrastructure Manager (NFVi/VIM) and OPEN-O.

Kirksey said the OPNFV Project started with OPEN-O for MANO because AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) hadn't yet put ECOMP into open source. Now OPEN-O has been combined with ECOMP, Kirksey said OPNFV will start down that path as well once the ONAP code base is complete. Kirksey said OPNFV is also interested in working with European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) on its MANO project, OSM, as well.

Danube also includes instrumentation of NFVi network telemetry to support service assurance and other use cases as well as multi-domain template support. Danube also has translation features between YANG and Tosca modeling languages.

On the CI/CD front, Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. added a lab-as-a-service project that provides real-time data along with a common dashboard for a consistent view of the testing ecosystem. It also introduced stress testing into the OPNFV test suite.

"We want to get feedback more quickly so we've been working with OpenStack, FD.io, Open Daylight and OPEN-O on getting our CI/CD pipeline connected and automated," Kirksey said.

Danube also includes work done with OpenStack Gluon, which Kirksey said made the compute and network less tightly coupled in order to make it easier for service providers to switch out their SDN controllers.

"The service providers are wanting all of the network control be in their SDN controller and Gluon is an abstract layer that lets them do that. It interfaces directly with the Nova API so you have more flexibility and control over your network control plane in SDN," she said.

Danube also hardened basic core features that were in previous releases, including IPv.6, BGP VPN and service function chaining.

As for what's next for OPNFV, in addition to working with ONAP, Kirksey said OPNFV is looking ahead at containers and Kubernetes, integrating with CORD, onboarding VNFS, and a couple of analytics projects with PNDA .

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation