London Release Key Updates

CCSDK/O-RAN: A1 Policy Functions

• Continued maturing A1-Policy controller functions:
  
  • Removed deprecated DMaaP NBI
  • Upgrade to JDK 17+
  • Numerous 3PP dependency updates
  • Improved support for custom south-bound adapters for custom A1-AP protocol versions
  • Improved test logging/report
  • Improved API documentation/formatting
  • Improved logging/debug-ability in CSIT tests
  • Added graceful shutdown operation to API
  • Added support for fine-grained access control enforcement

• NCMP registration and de-registration performance improvements
• General read and query performance improvements
• DMI Audit (query cm handles)
• Support multiple top level data nodes
• Added dataspace and schema sets queries
• XML support for writing data
• Support queries across anchors
• CPS Path enhancements
• 96% Percent OpenSSF Gold Standard badge 

• Clients can now register and de-register large scale networks (20k nodes) in a timely fashion
• Response times for many queries are no faster by a factor of 10-50
• Clients can query cm handles on properties they have
• No more limitation on single top level element in any model
• Nodes only supporting XML format can now be added to NCMP
• More varied ways of querying CPS Data and metadata
• Progress to gold badge gives clients a level of trust in the security and qualiyy aspects of CPS

DCAE Design Studio removed from R12 'London'.

PRH enhanced to process early PNF registrations

Continued migration of MR clients to use kafka native

• Interactive architecture diagram updated
• End-2-End guides removed because they have become outdated due to unmaintained projects.

Minor bug fixes, package upgrades and python version fixes.

Migration out of Orange infra and pipelines was started.

Minor bug fixes.

Package upgrades, etc

Introduction of "Production" ONAP setup, including:

• Istio Service Mesh based deployment
• Ingress (Istio-Gateway) deployment and usage as standard external access menthod (removal of Nodeports)
• Internal Security provided by ServiceMesh and Component2Component AuthorizationPolicies
• External Security by introducing AuthN/Z using Keycloak and OAuth2Proxy for Ingress Access

Removal of unsupported components (AAF, Portal, Contrib,...)

Update of component helmcharts to use common templates and practices

Introduction of Kubernetes Operators for

• Cassandra (k8ssandra-operator) - to support latest Cassandra version (optional for London)
• Keycloak

• Continuing the CloudNative journey of ONAP
• Use established best practices and products

• Improvements to CLAMP Automation Composition Management (ACM)
  CLAMP ACM is improved to allow much more flexibility in the specification and life cycle management of rApps. ACM can manage the lifecycle of rApps made up of an arbitrary number of microservices and rules/learning models/schemas in the form of metadata. In the London release, the state machine is improved to allow priming of rApp types, and to support deploymeent/undeployment and locking/unlocking of rApps. Update of the properties of rApps is also supported at run time. In addition, ITU Recommendation X.731 is now supported for state reporting from rApp microservices.

• Metadata driven API Generation
  Up until now, the Policy Framework components used handwritten code to implement their REST interfaces and the Swagger 2 API documentation was generated from annotations in the code. From the London release on, the REST API code is generated from OpenAPI 3.0 (Swagger 3.0) documents. In addition, the API documentation is substantially enhanced. See the Policy Offered APIs in the documentation.

• Improved Metrics and SLAs
  The metrics generated by the Policy Framework have been substantially improved for the London release. In addition to gathering metrics on REST call performance and policy deployment and execution time, we have defined SLA values for these metrics. We have implemented automated tests that run as part of the CSIT testing that ensure the SLAs are complied with.

• Improved Testing
  Testing is much improved in the London release.

  • S3P tests have been automated and run as CSIT tests

  • Automated tests to verify SLA compliance using prometheus metrics are added

  • A suite of contract tests is provided for each REST API

  • Tests now use http rather than https

• Support for constraints
  • Import of VFCs with property constraints
  • Display/edit/add property constraints in UI
  • Validate instance property values against constraints
  • Validate node template interface values against constraints
  • Validate instance attribute values against constraints
  • Validate service input default values against constraints
• UI support for view/edit/import data types
  • Enable importing of data types via the UI
  • Enable viewing/editing of data types in UI
• Increased support for TOSCA functions
  • Support TOSCA functions in operation implementation properties
  • Support TOSCA functions in map values
  • Support TOSCA functions in list entries
• Removed need for USER_ID cookie and header
  • SDC UI can be launched without needing the un-maintained portal and without the need for the workaround to set the USER_ID cookie
  • User defaults to cs0008, but can be overridden as before (using portal or manually setting cookie)

A1 policy and platform enhancements from CCSDK:

• Removed deprecated DMaaP NBI
• Upgrade to JDK 17+
• Numerous 3PP dependency updates
• Improved support for custom south-bound adapters for custom A1-AP protocol versions
• Improved test logging/report
• Improved API documentation/formatting
• Improved logging/debug-ability in CSIT tests
• Added graceful shutdown operation to API
• Added support for fine-grained access control enforcement

Introduction of Macro workflow to add a PNF to an existing active service instance

Minor bug fixes

• Remove dependency on AAF
• Enhance intent analysis server
  
  • Introduce AI technology to improve the intelligent level of intent processing. 
  • Enhance intent analysis server to support intent reporting.
  • Enhance the functions of intent translation for Cloud-network Convergence Services 

Enhancements for Configuration Management notification from O-RAN network fuctions over O1 interface. Includes: enhancements in RAN-Sim to generate CM VES message when configuration is modified, development of CPS DMI plugin and modifications to CPS NCMP to process CM VES message published by VES collector.

E2E Network Slicing

Added support for 3GPP 28.532 based APIs in NSSMF for network slicing, with focus on RAN slicing.

Support for generic provisioning APIs based on 3GPP 28.532, in addition to the existing slice-specific APIs based on 3GPP 28.531 for network slicing.

PNF software version onboarding

PNF support