ETSI NFV and MEC API 2021 testing event Report now available

ETSI NFV and MEC API 2021 testing event Report now available

Sophia Antipolis, 16 April 2021

The ETSI NFV&MEC API Plugtests™ 2021 event, which ran remotely during the whole month of February, allowed participants to self-evaluate the conformance of their API server implementations with network function virtualization and multi-access edge computing API specifications. The event allowed also to validate and gather feedback on ETSI NFV and MEC API and Conformance Testing Specifications, and associated Robot test suites. The full Report, including results, findings and lessons learnt is now available HERE.

Over 30 organizations participated in the event, providing network functions (NFs), virtual network function managers (VNFMs), NFV orchestrators (NFVOs), MEC platforms and services, test environments based on Openstack, StarlingX or Kubernetes, test tools and technical support. The event counted 5 supporting Open Source communities actively involved in the testing and 8 observers.

The NFV and MEC test suites were made available over the test automation platform hosted by ETSI. Participants connected their implementations (Functions Under Test) to a secure network and could arrange as many individual test sessions as desired, according to their time-zone and availability.

Overall, 29 NFV and MEC test suites were exercised and over 1200 test results recorded in the test automation platform, with the following main highlights:

• Availability of several versions of the NFV test suites, allowing participants to choose the version of the API to test (or to test several versions).
• Steady increase in the number and scope of tested NFV APIs and features, including this time APIs exposed by the VNFM over the Ve-Vnfm reference point (specified in ETSI NFV-SOL002).
• Improvement of the overall success rate of the API testing activities with an increase of 6% for NFV and 22% for MEC compared to the previous event.
• A high number of issues raised on the test specifications were fixed right away. In addition, 4 important findings have been collected and shared with NFV and MEC Industry Specification Groups for further discussion. This feedback is reported in Section 10 of the Report.
• The event saw a continuous support and participation of open source communities already active in the NFV and MEC ecosystems: AdvantEDGE, CNCF Kubernetes, ETSI Open Source MANO, OpenStack, StarlingX.

In addition to the API Conformance Testing, two experimental activities were hosted by external communities and offered to network function providers. The outcome of these two tracks is reported in Section 10.3.

• A track allowing to migrate legacy ETSI OSM descriptors to the latest ETSI NFV-SOL006 conformant format. This move towards standardized descriptors should improve interoperability and reduce integration efforts across NFs, VNFMs and NFVOs.
• A track allowing to self-asses the level of conformance of containerized functions to the Cloud Native principles defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The testing was complemented by a comparative analysis of the Cloud Native principles covered by the CNF conformance test suite and the ETSI NFV-EVE011 specification.

This NFV&MEC API Plugtests™ event provided a great opportunity for participants to get their API conformance tested in preparation of the NFV&MEC Interoperability Plugtests planned for October 2021.