ONAP Cloud Native Evolution

Plan and Next Steps

• Align ONAP Community on its role and relationship to the Cloud Native ecosystem
  • TSC Task force initiated to define on ONAP’s CNF strategy including

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• Include “ONAP-Lite” to the CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape.
  • Discussion being kick-off with LF (Arpit Joshipura)
• Promote ONAP’s CNF strategy through LF Events (ONES, DDF etc.) and press release(s)
  • CFP submitted for ONES NA

Role of ONAP

Role of ONAP (which is a central automation platform) across multiple Clouds & Edges.

1. Distributed Applications: Telco world is known to have requirement to support ‘network services’ whose components (VNFs today) spread across multiple computing regions (Openstack based regions).  Hence, the need for central orchestrator that orchestrates various VNFs of the network service in multiple openstack based computing regions.  With edge-computing,  even normal applications are becoming distributed, where few microservices of the application are deployed across multiple edges & few in network edges and public clouds. Essentially, applications are becoming more like network services.
2. Convergence of applications and network functions due to Edges : Edge world can’t afford to have two computing environments – One for normal applications and another one for network functions. This is due to resource constraints. Since many edge-computing efforts in Industry adopted K8s, it is natural to think about supporting network functions and use same K8s cluster for both. It appears that few MEC applications even require some network functions to be deployed along with them (Example MEC applications with network security functions).
3. Network function deployments and life cycle management are more complex than the applications due to need for supporting multiple interfaces, provider networks,  service function chaining. ONAP is solving many of these challenges.
4. Support for Multiple Cloud technologies :  Supporting legacy Openstack deployments with greenfield  K8s deployments are needed.  ONAP solves these multi-cloud challenges.
5. Support for Telco infrastructure such as OSS/BSS – ONAP is already in the path to support various MEF standards on its north side to support standardization between OSS/BSS and Orchestrators.
6. Support for monitoring of distributed applications and closed loops :  Monitoring distributed applications that are deployed across multiple edges/clouds is complex.  There is need for showing the comprehensive status at the application level instead of at each resource level.  ONAP monitors the services/distributed-apps and not only provides simpler view of the status, but also can run through various analytics engines and even act on the actionable insights.

Note:  ONAP4K8s is a profile of ONAP for Enterprise/IOT (Including Private-5G/LTE)  market that have requirement of deploying CNFs/VNFs along with normal applications in multiple K8s based clusters.

In addition, we believe that ONAP can provide additional values as follows:

#1 NF Control Loop

#2 NF Common Inventory

#3 NF Data collection and analytics

#4 Support of PNFs

#5 Cover the design of services as well as the orchestration of services, design of control loops

#6 Play a role in terms of standardizations (TMForum, ETSI ZSM, MEC etc.) through our ONAP Technical Coordinators

To recap, we can provide significant automation values to handle applications on top of the K8S environment.

Areas of Focus

#1 ONAP 'Light" Weight - Review our current ONAP projects (see Lifecycle review led by Jason/Chaker)

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Meeting Notes

ONAP to support CNFs
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