1 .. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
2 .. 4.0 International License.
3 .. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
4 .. Copyright 2019 Nokia; Copyright 2017-2018 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.; Copyright 2017 AT&T Intellectual Property.
6 Open Network Automation Platform Overview
7 =========================================
9 The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project addresses the
10 rising need for a **common automation platform for telecommunication, cable,
11 and cloud service providers**—and their solution providers— that enables the
12 **automation of different lifecycle processes**, to deliver differentiated
13 network services on demand, profitably and competitively, while leveraging
16 Prior to ONAP, telecommunication network operators had to keep up with the
17 scale and cost of manual changes required to implement new service offerings,
18 from installing new data center equipment to, in some cases, upgrading
19 customer equipment on-premises. Many operators are seeking to exploit
20 Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
21 to improve service velocity, simplify equipment interoperability and
22 integration, and reduce overall CapEx and OpEx costs. In addition, the
23 current, highly fragmented management landscape makes it difficult to
24 monitor and guarantee service-level agreements (SLAs).
26 ONAP is addressing these challenges by developing global and massive
27 scale (multi-site and multi-Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM))
28 automation capabilities for both physical and virtual network elements.
29 It facilitates service agility by supporting data models for rapid
30 service and resource deployment, by providing a common set of Northbound
31 REST APIs that are open and interoperable, and by supporting model
32 driven interfaces to the networks. ONAP’s modular and layered nature
33 improves interoperability and simplifies integration, allowing it to
34 support multiple VNF environments by integrating with multiple VIMs,
35 virtualized network function managers (VNFMs), SDN Controllers, and
36 even legacy equipment. ONAP’s consolidated VNF requirements enable
37 commercial development of ONAP-compliant VNFs. This approach allows
38 network and cloud operators to optimize their physical and virtual
39 infrastructure for cost and performance; at the same time, ONAP’s
40 use of standard models reduces integration and deployment costs of
41 heterogeneous equipment, while minimizing management fragmentation.
46 ONAP enables end user organizations and their network or cloud providers
47 to collaboratively instantiate network elements and services in a dynamic,
48 closed control loop process, with real-time response to actionable events.
50 ONAP’s major activities, that is designing, deploying and operating
51 services, are provided based on ONAP’s two major frameworks, namely on
52 Design-time framework and Run-time framework:
54 .. image:: media/ONAP_main_functions.png
57 In order to design, deploy and operate services and assure these dynamic
58 services, ONAP activities are built up as follows:
60 * **Service design** – Service design is built on a robust design framework that
61 allows specification of the service in all aspects – modeling the resources and
62 relationships that make up the service, specifying the policy rules that guide
63 the service behavior, specifying the applications, analytics and closed control
64 loop events needed for the elastic management of the service.
65 * **Service deployment** – Service deployment is built on an orchestration
66 and control framework that is policy-driven (Service Orchestrator and
67 Controllers) to provide automated instantiation of the service when
68 needed and managing service demands in an elastic manner.
69 * **Service operations** – Service operations are built on an analytic
70 framework that closely monitors the service behavior during the service
71 lifecycle based on the specified design, analytics and policies to enable
72 response as required from the control framework, to deal with situations
73 ranging from those that require healing to those that require scaling
74 of the resources to elastically adjust to demand variations.
76 ONAP enables product- or service-independent capabilities for design,
77 deployment and operation, in accordance with the following foundational
80 1. Ability to dynamically introduce full service lifecycle orchestration
81 (design, provisioning and operation) and service API for new services
82 and technologies without the need for new platform software releases
83 or without affecting operations for the existing services
85 2. Carrier-grade scalability including horizontal scaling (linear scale-out)
86 and distribution to support large number of services and large networks
88 3. Metadata-driven and policy-driven architecture to ensure flexible and
89 automated ways in which capabilities are used and delivered
91 4. The architecture shall enable sourcing best-in-class components
93 5. Common capabilities are ‘developed’ once and ‘used’ many times
95 6. Core capabilities shall support many diverse services and infrastructures
97 7. The architecture shall support elastic scaling as needs grow or shrink
99 Functional overview of ONAP
100 ===========================
102 The following guidelines show the main ONAP activities in a chronological order, presenting ONAP's functional structure:
104 1. **Service design** - ONAP supports Service Design operations, using the TOSCA approach.
105 These service design activities are built up of the following subtasks:
106 a. Planning VNF onboarding – checking which VNFs will be necessary for the required environment and features
107 b. Creating resources, composing services
108 c. Distributing services - Distributing services constitutes of 2 subtasks:
109 * TOSCA C-SAR package is stored in the Catalog
110 * new service notification is published
112 2. **Service orchestration and deployment**
113 a. Defining which VNFs are necessary for the service
114 b. Defining orchestration steps
115 c. Selecting valid cloud region
116 d. Service orchestration calling cloud APIs to deploy VNFs
117 * The onboarding and instantiation of VNFs in ONAP is represented via
118 the example of onboarding and instantiating a virtual network function
119 (VNF), the virtual Firewall (vFirewall). Following the guidelines and
120 steps of this example, any other VNF can be similarly onboarded
121 and instantiated to ONAP. See :ref:`virtual Firewall Onboarding and
122 Instantiating <vfirewall_usecase>` examples.
123 e. Controllers applying configuration on VNFs
124 3. **Service operations**
125 a. Closed Loop design and deployment
126 b. Collecting and evaluating event data
131 Open Network Automation Platform provides the following benefits:
133 * common automation platform, which enables common management of services and
134 connectivity, while the applications run separately
135 * a unified operating framework for vendor-agnostic, policy-driven service
136 design, implementation, analytics and lifecycle management for
137 large-scale workloads and services
138 * orchestration for both virtual and physical network functions
139 * ONAP offers Service or VNF Configuration capability, in contrast to other
140 open-source orchestration platforms
141 * the model-driven approach enables ONAP to support services, that are using
142 different VNFs, as a common service block
143 * service modelling enables operators to use the same deployment and management
144 mechanisms, beside also using the same platform
146 ONAP Release information
147 ========================
149 ONAP is enhanced with numerous features from release to release. Each release
150 is named after a city.
152 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
153 |Release Name |Release version |Release Date |Features delivered |
154 +======================+================+======================+===========================================================+
155 |Casablanca |* 3.0.2 |* 31 January 2019 | :ref:`Casablanca Release Notes <casablancarelease-notes>` |
156 | |* 3.0.1 |* 30 November 2018 | |
157 | |* 3.0.0 |* 15 April 2019 | |
158 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
159 |Beijing |2.0.0 |7 June 2018 | +
160 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
161 |Amsterdam |1.0.0 |16 November 2017 | +
162 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
164 ONAP Blueprints and environments
165 ================================
167 ONAP is able to deploy and operate VNFs running OpenStack based Centralized Private Cloud Instances, as well as Mobile Edge Cloud instances.
168 ONAP has been tested in the following network environments:
170 * Voice Over LTE (VoLTE)
171 * Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)
173 * Cross Domain and Cross Layer VPN (CCVPN)
174 * Broadband Service (BBS)
179 Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) is an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
181 ONAP Source Code is licensed under the `Apache Version 2 License <http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>`_.
182 ONAP Documentation is licensed under the `Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
183 International License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>`_.