Highlights of our ONAP Introduction and Overview Webinar

We recently completed our webinar overviewing and introducing the ONAP project. As many of you might already know, ONAP is the Open Network Automation Platform, being built to manage the NFV networks of the future. With the recent addition of Verizon, ONAP now covers over 60% of total global mobile subscribers, and the future is bright for successful adoption by the service provider community.

Watch the Intro to ONAP webinar on demand

The ONAP Overview webinar covered many of the general ideas that the ONAP project is trying to achieve, the architecture behind the project, the partner members who are currently involved, as well as the different projects and use cases that are currently available. We discussed everything from the origins of NFV and what the proposed service provider value is, to the web scale concepts which gave birth to the ONAP mind-frame of automating everything in the system. NFV is bringing DevOps best practices like Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Monitoring to the networking services world, and one of the goals of ONAP is helping bring this monumental paradigm shift to fruition.
We gave an overview of various components of the project, like the service assurance, which takes ONAP beyond the ETSI NFV MANO scope. We talked about the different architectural principles, and how they are model driven, thus requiring no custom design, and can be re-used at scale.

A quick poll of our webinar audience shows that just a little over 68% said that they are already trying out ONAP, or planning to in the next six months:

The webinar was presented by Amar from Aarna Networks. Amar is a veteran of the NFV industry, and leads the NFV Strategy team at Aarna Networks, who provides products and services around open source NFV projects, like ONAP.
Cloudify’s very own Amir Levy was also on hand to answer live questions during the webinar. Amir is the Director of Technical Market Development at the Cloudify CTO office, a ONAP Project PTL , and is extremely well versed in the ONAP ecosystem. He diligently answered many of the ONAP related questions that were asked in the webinar including:

• How amenable is ONAP to hybrid and transitional architectures with PNFs,VNFs, legacy OSS elements, etc?
  • PNF’s are considered to be supported in Rel2 (Beijing). VNFs will be discussed on later slides. Overall – everything can be stitched together – but OSS is only supported via REST out-of-the-box.
• I am the TSC chair for OpenSwitch – a open networking platform – is there someone that I can talk to about how we investigate integrating with SDN-C?
  • I would start with discussing a possible contribution with the project PTL (technical lead) : you can find more information in the ONAP-wiki at wiki.onap.org
• For integration of 3rd party sDN controller with SDN-C – what are the southbound interface and integration ways (plugins etc). Any 3rd party controllers supported today e.g. ONOS?
  • OpenDaylight is supported today. If you want to contribute ONOS integration that’s possible.
• Is there a roadmap for ONAP to support other VIM types; especially Bare Metal IaaS such as MaaS-API/Packet.Net or other Cloud IaaS types (AWS, Azure etc)?
  • Multi-cloud/Multi-VIM project addresses this aspect.
• How are we advancing towards the support of network slicing?
  • Network slicing support in the Amsterdam release is early; but expect a lot more in the upcoming Beijing release. 5G and network slicing are use cases the community is actively working on for Beijing.
• Is there a lab suitable setup of ONAP like OSM offer? What I mean is without requiring multiple servers?
  • Yes, the OOM project deployment requires only 1 VM. It can be deployed on AWS or Google Cloud also so you don’t need your own infrastructure.
• In which area ONAP is integrating to Kubernetes
  • ONAP and Kubernetes have two areas of intersection. 1) Using K8s to manage the lifecycle of ONAP — this is available through OOM and 2) Using k8s as a VIM — this is a future activity and not currently supported.
• When is the Beijing release expected?
  • Beijing is expected to be released in Q2 of 2018
• Any future plans for ONAP to integrate with serverless platform too?
  • This is currently not supported nor in the scope of any specific project. Cloudify does offer the ability to integrate with serverless platforms.
• Can you clarify whether you expect the k8s/OOM work to address deploying VNFs as a container?
  • As said live – this is an area for the multi-cloud to discuss
• Kubernetes overlay area or automation? Overlay as in networks – software defined networks like flannel, calico, romana and VNF.
  • SDN-C supports overlay networks… OOM/k8s supports overlay as well.
• Is ONAP200 class free or paid? Does ONAP200 includes ONAP100 course inside? Can you provide a link to register?
  • The ONAP training  is paid. ONAP200 is a superset of ONAP100, the real difference is labs. ONAP200 = ONAP100 + labs.You can register at cloudify.co/ONAP-training

You can watch the recorded version of the webinar, by registering at on our Introduction to ONAP Webinar page. You can learn more about what is ONAP, or download the ONAP NFV Roadmap whitepaper.
Look out for additional ONAP onsite training and webinars in the near future!