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The primary benefits of this approach are as follows:
- Life-cycle Management. Kubernetes is a comprehensive system for managing the life-cycle of containerized applications. Its use as a platform manager will ease the deployment of ONAP, provide fault tolerance and horizontal scalability, and enable seamless upgrades.
- Hardware Efficiency. As opposed to VMs that require a guest operating system be deployed along with the application, containers provide similar application encapsulation with neither the computing, memory and storage overhead nor the associated long term support costs of those guest operating systems. An informal goal of the project is to be able to create a development deployment of ONAP that can be hosted on a laptop.
- Deployment Speed. Eliminating the guest operating system results in containers coming into service much faster than a VM equivalent. This advantage can be particularly useful for ONAP where rapid reaction to inevitable failures will be critical in production environments.
- Cloud Provider Flexibility. A Kubernetes deployment of ONAP enables hosting the platform on multiple hosted cloud solutions like Google Compute Engine, AWS EC2, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink Cloud, IBM Bluemix and more.
In no way does this project impair or undervalue the VM deployment methodology currently used in ONAP. Selection of an appropriate deployment solution is left to the ONAP user.
Challenges
Although the current structure of ONAP lends itself to a container based manager there are challenges that need to be overcome to complete this project as follows:
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