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.;
5 .. Copyright 2017 AT&T Intellectual Property
7 Open Network Automation Platform Overview
8 =========================================
10 The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project addresses the
11 rising need for a **common automation platform for telecommunication, cable,
12 and cloud service providers**—and their solution providers— that enables the
13 **automation of different lifecycle processes**, to deliver differentiated
14 network services on demand, profitably and competitively, while leveraging
17 Prior to ONAP, telecommunication network operators had to keep up with the
18 scale and cost of manual changes required to implement new service offerings,
19 from installing new data center equipment to, in some cases, upgrading
20 customer equipment on-premises. Many operators are seeking to exploit
21 Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
22 to improve service velocity, simplify equipment interoperability and
23 integration, and reduce overall CapEx and OpEx costs. In addition, the
24 current, highly fragmented management landscape makes it difficult to
25 monitor and guarantee service-level agreements (SLAs).
27 ONAP is addressing these challenges by developing global and massive
28 scale (multi-site and multi-Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM))
29 automation capabilities for both physical and virtual network elements.
30 It facilitates service agility by supporting data models for rapid
31 service and resource deployment, by providing a common set of Northbound
32 REST APIs that are open and interoperable, and by supporting model
33 driven interfaces to the networks. ONAP’s modular and layered nature
34 improves interoperability and simplifies integration, allowing it to
35 support multiple VNF environments by integrating with multiple VIMs,
36 virtualized network function managers (VNFMs), SDN Controllers, and
37 even legacy equipment. ONAP’s consolidated VNF requirements enable
38 commercial development of ONAP-compliant VNFs. This approach allows
39 network and cloud operators to optimize their physical and virtual
40 infrastructure for cost and performance; at the same time, ONAP’s
41 use of standard models reduces integration and deployment costs of
42 heterogeneous equipment, while minimizing management fragmentation.
47 ONAP enables end user organizations and their network or cloud providers
48 to collaboratively instantiate network elements and services in a dynamic,
49 closed control loop process, with real-time response to actionable events.
51 ONAP’s major activities, that is designing, deploying and operating
52 services, are provided based on ONAP’s two major frameworks, namely on
53 Design-time framework and Run-time framework:
55 .. image:: media/ONAP_main_functions.png
58 In order to design, deploy and operate services and assure these dynamic
59 services, ONAP activities are built up as follows:
61 * **Service design** – Service design is built on a robust design framework
62 that allows specification of the service in all aspects – modeling the
63 resources and relationships that make up the service, specifying the policy
64 rules that guide the service behavior, specifying the applications, analytic
65 and closed control loop events needed for the elastic management of the
67 * **Service deployment** – Service deployment is built on an orchestration
68 and control framework that is policy-driven (Service Orchestrator and
69 Controllers) to provide automated instantiation of the service when
70 needed and managing service demands in an elastic manner.
71 * **Service operations** – Service operations are built on an analytic
72 framework that closely monitors the service behavior during the service
73 lifecycle based on the specified design, analytics and policies to enable
74 response as required from the control framework, to deal with situations
75 ranging from those that require healing to those that require scaling
76 of the resources to elastically adjust to demand variations.
78 ONAP enables product- or service-independent capabilities for design,
79 deployment and operation, in accordance with the following foundational
82 1. Ability to dynamically introduce full service lifecycle orchestration
83 (design, provisioning and operation) and service API for new services
84 and technologies without the need for new platform software releases
85 or without affecting operations for the existing services
87 2. Carrier-grade scalability including horizontal scaling (linear scale-out)
88 and distribution to support large number of services and large networks
90 3. Metadata-driven and policy-driven architecture to ensure flexible and
91 automated ways in which capabilities are used and delivered
93 4. The architecture shall enable sourcing best-in-class components
95 5. Common capabilities are ‘developed’ once and ‘used’ many times
97 6. Core capabilities shall support many diverse services and infrastructures
99 7. The architecture shall support elastic scaling as needs grow or shrink
101 Functional overview of ONAP
102 ===========================
104 The following guidelines show the main ONAP activities in a chronological
105 order, presenting ONAP's functional structure:
107 1. **Service design** - ONAP supports Service Design operations, using the
109 These service design activities are built up of the following subtasks:
111 a. Planning VNF onboarding – checking which VNFs will be necessary for the
112 required environment and features
113 b. Creating resources, composing services
114 c. Distributing services - Distributing services constitutes of 2 subtasks:
116 * TOSCA C-SAR package is stored in the Catalog
117 * new service notification is published
119 2. **Service orchestration and deployment**
121 a. Defining which VNFs are necessary for the service
122 b. Defining orchestration steps
123 c. Selecting valid cloud region
124 d. Service orchestration calling cloud APIs to deploy VNFs
126 * The onboarding and instantiation of VNFs in ONAP is represented via
127 the example of onboarding and instantiating a virtual network function
128 (VNF), the virtual Firewall (vFirewall). Following the guidelines and
129 steps of this example, any other VNF can be similarly onboarded
130 and instantiated to ONAP. See :ref:`virtual Firewall Onboarding and
131 Instantiating <vfirewall_usecase>` examples.
133 e. Controllers applying configuration on VNFs
135 3. **Service operations**
137 a. Closed Loop design and deployment
138 b. Collecting and evaluating event data
143 Open Network Automation Platform provides the following benefits:
145 * common automation platform, which enables common management of services and
146 connectivity, while the applications run separately
147 * a unified operating framework for vendor-agnostic, policy-driven service
148 design, implementation, analytics and lifecycle management for
149 large-scale workloads and services
150 * orchestration for both virtual and physical network functions
151 * ONAP offers Service or VNF Configuration capability, in contrast to other
152 open-source orchestration platforms
153 * the model-driven approach enables ONAP to support services, that are using
154 different VNFs, as a common service block
155 * service modelling enables operators to use the same deployment and management
156 mechanisms, beside also using the same platform
158 ONAP Release information
159 ========================
161 ONAP is enhanced with numerous features from release to release. Each release
162 is named after a city.
164 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
165 |Release Name |Release version |Release Date |Features delivered |
166 +======================+================+======================+===========================================================+
167 |El Alto |5.0.1 | 24 October 2019 | :ref:`El Alto Release Notes <release-notes>` |
168 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
169 |Dublin |4.0.0 | 9 July 2019 | |
170 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
171 |Casablanca |* 3.0.2 |* 31 January 2019 | |
172 | |* 3.0.1 |* 30 November 2018 | |
173 | |* 3.0.0 |* 15 April 2019 | |
174 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
175 |Beijing |2.0.0 |7 June 2018 | +
176 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
177 |Amsterdam |1.0.0 |16 November 2017 | +
178 +----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
180 ONAP Blueprints and environments
181 ================================
183 ONAP is able to deploy and operate VNFs running OpenStack based Centralized
184 Private Cloud Instances, as well as Mobile Edge Cloud instances.
185 ONAP has been tested in the following network environments:
187 * Voice Over LTE (VoLTE)
188 * Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)
190 * Cross Domain and Cross Layer VPN (CCVPN)
191 * Broadband Service (BBS)
196 Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) is an open source project hosted by the
199 ONAP Source Code is licensed under the `Apache Version 2 License <http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>`_.
200 ONAP Documentation is licensed under the `Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
201 International License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>`_.