ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) Activity Report 2023

Chair: Francisco-Javier Ramón Salguero, Telefónica S.A.

Open Source MANO is a community-led project hosted by ETSI to develop an Open Source NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) software stack aligned with ETSI NFV.

ETSI is actively exploring synergies between the worlds of open source and standardization in its work on NFV. Two key components of the ETSI NFV architectural framework are the NFV Orchestrator and the Virtualized Network Function (VNF) manager, referred to collectively as NFV Management and Orchestration, or MANO.

ETSI OSG OSM (Open Source MANO) has primary responsibility to develop an open source implementation of ETSI NFV MANO. As a community-led project, the output of OSM is a production-quality MANO stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models that meets operators' requirements for commercial NFV deployments.

OSG OSM complements the work of ISG NFV and vice versa. In particular, OSG OSM provides an opportunity to capitalise on the synergy between standardization and open source approaches by accessing a greater and more diverse set of contributors and developers than would normally be possible. This approach maximizes innovation, efficiency and time to market, and ensures a continuous feedback loop into NFV standardization with a continuing series of conformant reference implementations.

The OSM community delivers one Long Term Support (LTS) and one regular release every year, to ensure the OSM user base is provided with continuous innovations and production-ready stability.

Delivered in July 2023, OSM Release FOURTEEN is a Long-Term-Support (LTS) release delivering significant improvements in many key areas. It offers a new scalable architecture for service assurance based on Apache Airflow and Prometheus, and includes closed loops for auto-scaling and the handling of alerts coming from the Network Functions. It also enables scheduled monitoring and service-assurance workflows, as well as alarm-based on-demand workflows – capabilities that will be key to supporting new telco cloud use cases in future Releases.

Release FOURTEEN notably features:

  • Long Term Support (24 months of bug fixes and security patches)
  • Closed Loop Life Cycle Architecture
  • Security enhancements
  • Better usability and platform management
  • Optimized infrastructure modelling and network function life cycle
  • Smoother installation, update and upgrade of OSM Services
  • Improvements in OSM Client

OSM Release FIFTEEN was announced in December 2023 as a regular release including significant improvements in many key areas, including:

  • Network Service instantiation and lifecycle management. Enables new use cases in private clouds based on Openstack, such as the support of Service Function Chaining and the support of Availability Zones for Cinder-based storage when instantiating a Network Function. In addition, a new cancel operation has been added for Network Service lifecycle, which allows cancelling a pending action over a Network Service.
  • Support of new Kubernetes features. Includes the support of OCI registries for Helm‑based Kubernetes Deployment Units (KDU). OSM can now retrieve helm charts from both authenticated and non-authenticated OCI registries. In addition, the support of Helm v2 for Helm-based KDU and Execution Environments has been discontinued, following the upstream recommendation from Helm upstream.
  • VNF Management interface. Continues enriching the SOL003-based VNFM API offered by OSM, in addition to the main SOL005 API. Specifically, in this release dual-stack IP support has been added to enable operators to assign both IPv4 and IPv6 static addresses to VNFs launched through the VNFM API.
  • Closed-loop life cycle in public clouds. In the last two releases, a new Service Assurance (SA) framework based on Apache Airflow was introduced. Release FIFTEEN improves this new SA framework with the capability of gathering resource consumption metrics from VMs deployed on Google Cloud. This, combined with the closed loop workflows, enables auto-healing and auto-scaling capabilities for VNFs running in Google Cloud.
  • OSM installation. Leverages the OSM helm chart introduced in Release FOURTEEN community installer and extends it to include upstream helm charts for Kafka, Zookeeper, MongoDB and MySQL as dependencies. By using upstream helm charts, those components will be easier to maintain and upgrade, while benefiting from upstream built-in features such as replication and persistent storage. In addition, all container images that have reached or were close to End-Of-Life support have been updated to guarantee proper support in the coming years. Finally, preparing for the discontinuation of Juju support in future LTS releases, the use of Juju and its dependencies has been made optional since Release FIFTEEN. As a result, Juju-based EE and KDU will only be available when Juju has been enabled during OSM installation.
  • End-to-end testing. In this release cycle, the testing pipeline of OSM community has evolved to include regular tests over Azure Public cloud in the upstream builds, paving the way to testing other clouds regularly in the future, such as AWS or Google Cloud. In addition, the Robot based E2E test framework has been enhanced to include well‑known linters such as Robocop and Robotframework-lint, which facilitate the maintenance of OSM E2E tests.

To date (January 2024), code for OSM Releases has been downloaded over 80,000 times from 85+ countries.

36 EU Research Projects – the majority of them working on 5G/6G – are using and contributing code and feedback to OSM. Overall the worldwide OSM community numbers 43 members and 110 participants (153 organisations in total).

The OSM community also works in close cooperation with the TeraFlowSDN community, with a new plugin being developed in 2023 to enable smooth interworking between the two components. Meanwhile several cross-community efforts have been launched, including an initiative to build an end-to-end cross-project test bed based on shared ETSI infrastructure.

Events during the year included:

  • OSM Release THIRTEEN Webinar @BrightTALK (January 25th)
  • OSM-MR#14 Ecosystem Day, Remote (March 8th)
  • OSM#15 Hackfest, Barcelona (June 12-16th)
  • OSM#15 Ecosystem Day, Barcelona (June 14th)
  • OSM Release FOURTEEN Webinar @BrightTALK (September 12th)
  • OSM#16 Ecosystem Day, Remote (November 29th)

See OSM Hackfest presentations, demonstrations and talks on the dedicated Open Source MANO YouTube channel.

Learn more about OSM activities at osm.etsi.org.