ONAP sparks up its first release – Amsterdam

The Open Network Automation Platform has served up its first release, which is designed to to offer a unified architecture for network automation.

Such is the mind-boggling complexity of virtualizing and automating networks that open source collaboration is widely considered to be the most effective way of doing so in an interoperable way. ONAP claims this is the first open source project to unite the majority of operators with the majority of vendors in building an automation and orchestration platform. Apparently ONAP’s members account for 55% of the world’s mobile subscribers.

“Amsterdam represents significant progress for both the ONAP community and the greater open source networking ecosystem at large,” said Arpit Joshipura, GM of Networking and Orchestration at The Linux Foundation, which runs ONAP. “By bringing together member resources, Amsterdam is the first step toward realization of a globally shared architecture and implementation for network automation, based on open source and open standards.”

The two specific use-cases covered by Amsterdam are VoLTE – specifically virtualizing the core network to allow the management of a VoLTE service – and residential vCPE – allwing CSPs to add new services quickly and easily. As you might have guessed, this starts a sequence of capital city release names in alphabetical order. The next one will be called Beijing and is scheduled for the summer of 2018, which may coincide with 3GPP release 15 for 5G.

In its thorough analysis of the release, Light Reading is cautiously positive about the release, noting that ONAP seems to be gathering the kind of critical mass of contributors that will be vital for it to be an industry-wide platform, although AT&T seems to be doing much of the heavy lifting. Here’s a vid.