In early March, ETSI’s ISG NFV gathered again in ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis. This 41st plenary meeting was collocated with a special event celebrating the 10 years anniversary of this very important Industry Specification Group adding together again many NFV friends from all around the world. (More details of NFV 10th anniversary can be found in the next post: https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/news/2204-etsi-s-conference-for-nfv-10th-anniversary-looks-to-the-future).

 The NFV#41 opening plenary was held at the very beginning of the week. ETSI ISG NFV chair Yoshihiro Nakajima started by highlighting the achievements from the NFV#40 - ETSI ISG NFV continues to deliver with very good pace. As well, he took advantage to briefly announce the 10th anniversary event -a good opportunity to not only celebrate the accomplishments that NFV has made in the past 10 years, but also to look forward to the future.

The TSC manager, Ulrich Kleber presented in depth the description of Releases 4 and 5, but also an overview of the Release 6. The updated schedule for those releases was detailed showing our group’s intention to speed up the standards’ creation process and alignment with the industry fast progress in this area.

Diego Lopez, NFV NOC’s chair, started his speech by talking about the recently-published NOC's white paper. He continued by sharing recent operators’ considerations on the relationship between ETSI standards and other cloud-related standards and specifications. Some proposals for future actions were triggered for the ISG including a more direct and dynamic interaction with open-source projects and convergence of K8s and NFV network models.

The opening plenary was followed by the workshop dedicated to the anniversary of our group and by two extremely busy and productive days allocated to the WG sessions. More and more consensuses converged in the community on the visions, way forward directions and challenges reflected also in the two new NFV whitepapers created for the 10th anniversary milestone. Release 6 features kick off to fulfill these attractive objectives with concrete action plan.

The NFV#41 plenary meeting adopted an intensive schedule for its opening/closing sessions and working group meetings. During the past 3 months from NFV#40 plenary, several important ISG deliverables have been approved and published by the ISG, including:

• ETSI GS NFV-006 v4.4.1: first Release 4 NFV architectural framework with supporting OS container management and orchestration
• ETSI GR NFV-EVE 022 v5.1.1 on VNF configuration
• ETSI GS NFV-IFA 048 v4.4.1 on MANO policy information model
• ETSI GR NFV-IFA 044 v5.1.1 on flexible VNF deployment
• ETSI GR NFV-REL 013 v5.1.1 on cognitive use of operations data for reliability

At NFV#41, not only 14 IFAed441 specifications (including maintenance and enhancement from Release 4 features), but also one new deliverable - ETSI GS NFV-IFA 047 - on MDAF service interface were approved by the ISG. 10 final drafts from SOLed441 work items were sent for approval process via remote consensus. All those were accomplished thanks to the great team cooperation between rapporteurs and contributors who have carefully followed the objectives and schedule of these work items.

• Other highlights from NFV#41: 3 Release 6 and 1 Release 5 feature proposals being endorsed:

Release 6

- New infrastructure for NFV
- New application virtualization forms
- Deterministic communication technologies

Release 5

- Physical infrastructure management

• One Release 6 NWI proposal on architectural support for NFV evolution will be feature independent and would be finalized in IFA
• NWI proposals approved by the ISG:

- Continuation of the stage 2 work in release 4, define by a Super-WID with 16 NWIs. These form the edition 451 for IFA specifications and intend to complete the release 4 feature work.

- Specification of availability and reliability requirements in NFV automation

- Specification on Physical Infrastructure Management that will be sent for remote consensus

• ISG approved one liaison reply that was sent out to ITU-T in response to SG11-LS46
• In a joint WG session of IFA, SOL and SEC, transparent working procedures on stage 2/stage 3 were agreed for coordination of the development of security management features.

Until next plenary, having a very loaded work programme, ISG NFV will try to progress on Release 4, Release 5 and on the features proposals and crystallization for the upcoming Release 6. In parallel, in various meetings (at WGs and/or at leadership levels), we will continue to explore improvements on ISG organization, cooperation with other SDOs and working procedures which will help ISG NFV to follow the best path towards a successful evolution. All those will be consolidated during NFV#42.

In the early summer the ISG will meet again; hot discussions and debates on new organizational and work-programme-related topics are worth looking forward to.