On October 10th 2024, ETSI ISG NFV and Linux Foundation (LF) Europe project Sylva (https://sylvaproject.org/), hosted a joint workshop at the Paris NetworkX 2024 event (https://networkxevent.com/) held in October 2024, to continue the collaboration between the two organizations in mutual areas of interest. Details about the first joint workshop in March 2024, initiating possible cooperation between the two organizations can be seen in the blogpost at https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/entry/nfv-45-plenary-meeting. Both organizations share common goals of transforming large-scale telecom networks based on the cloud-native principles. A simplified cloud-native framework for managing telco workloads as well as the Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) infrastructure layer, energy efficiency and security across the framework are among the mutual goals of NFV and Sylva.

Experts and contributors from LF Sylva project and ETSI ISG NFV, and participants of NetworkX event were among the audience of this workshop. Presenters from both ETSI ISG NFV and LF Sylva project talked about past achievements, ongoing activities, and future outlook of their respective organizations. Additionally, a panel discussion took place on “Standards meet opensource: the journey towards AI Native” around challenges and opportunities related to cloud-native and AI‑native telecom networks.

From the NFV side, the TSC Chair Brendan Hassett (Huawei) gave an overview of ETSI ISG NFV and its scope of activities. He summarized the features and topics delivered in Release 5 of NFV specifications including energy efficiency support, physical infrastructure management capabilities, and enhancements related to container networking and multi-site connectivity.  Newly identified topics currently studied in Release 6, e.g., new kinds of NFVI resources, compute-network convergence, new virtualization technologies and Model-as-a-Service, were also highlighted.

From the Sylva side, Julie Borghese (Orange) gave an overview of the Sylva project, its achievements so far, on-going activities and future plans. This presentation highlighted the objectives and motivations behind Sylva project, including the five technical pillars on which the project stands: performance, distributed cloud, security, opensource, and energy efficiency. Hanen Garcia (Red Hat) also highlighted Sylva’s validation program that consists of validation streams and various validation centers hosted by major European telecom operators like Telefonica, Telecom Italia and Orange.

On the topic of energy efficiency, Hanen Garcia gave a presentation summarizing the features and activities in Sylva. During his presentation, he highlighted Sylva’s mission on energy efficiency and the roadmap that the project is following in pursuing this mission. Sylva is looking at both the hardware and software layers to enhance overall energy efficiency and make system-level optimizations. Furthermore, Sylva is currently developing a ‘green scheduler’ layer, which intends to schedule workloads across the nodes in Sylva-based clusters with the objective of decreasing overall energy consumption.

Panel discussion: ‘AI and Future Telco – Challenges and Opportunities’

At the end of the joint workshop, experts from both organizations participated in a panel discussion on the topic of “AI and Future Telco - challenges and opportunities”. Joan Triay (DOCOMO, ETSI NFV delegate), Xu Yang (Huawei, ETSI NFV delegate), Nicolas Homo (Orange, Sylva leadership), Tim Irnich (SUSE, Sylva leadership) were among the panellists and the panel discussion was moderated by Brendan Hassett (Huawei, NFV TSC Chair).

Regarding the increasingly significant role of AI in Telco deployments, the panellists identified challenges related to management of new kinds of hardware resources, optimization in networking topology for AI training and inference, energy consumption issues related to AI workloads, and last but not the least observability on all layers (telco cloud, orchestration functions, network functions/applications). One opportunity that was identified during the panel discussions was to manage large amounts of data - along with its secrecy and privacy constraints - that will be required for the AI in Telco.

In this panel, other topics related to cloud-nativeness, such as the trend of declarative management, and prospects for future collaboration between the two organizations, ETSI NFV and Sylva project, were further discussed. From ETSI NFV representatives’ perspective, the use of descriptors for LCM were highlighted as one of the drivers for declarative management, with the potential for further enhancements in related interfaces specified by ETSI NFV, such as SOL018 and SOL020. As one of the key issues for ETSI NFV, the new ideas being explored regarding an evolution of its architectural framework and the expansion to accommodate additional virtualization/cloudification technologies, are good candidates for mutual exploration as well.

A follow-up virtual workshop took place between ETSI ISG NFV and LF Sylva project on 25th October 2024. Experts and members from both NFV and Sylva communities participated in this two hour long virtual workshop. The main topic of this workshop was around energy efficiency, with presentations about energy efficiency related use cases and progresses made in that area. Sylva experts provided a deep dive into the Kepler framework and how Sylva is making use of it to build their energy efficiency support around it. Joan Triay (DOCOMO), feature prime of ‘Green NFV’ gave an overview of the feature and highlighted potential synergies and touch points between NFV and Sylva. Joan also summarized the use cases, key issues and related solutions developed in ETSI GR NFV‑EVE 021 (https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gr/NFV-EVE/001_099/021/05.01.01_60/gr_NFV-EVE021v050101p.pdf) to provide energy efficiency support in the NFV framework.

Sylva experts also showcase their on-going work on the energy consumption and CO2 manufacturing monitoring framework and its initial data model. Sylva’s work on “Green Scheduler” was presented along with its evaluation as compared to default Kubernetes scheduler. Sylva is looking into optimizing power states of underlying CPUs/GPUs based on workload utilization. NFV already has developed this use case in ETSI GR NFV-EVE 021 (Use Case #8) as well as some relevant solutions to realize the use case. NFV and Sylva experts plan to explore a joint opportunity to work on and realizing some use case, potentially using NFV’s Proof-of-Concept (PoC) framework.