Also from Linux Foundation, the organization is rationalizing some of the projects within its umbrella group of network-focused activities, LF Networking (LFN). It will merge the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT) and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) into a single project called Anuket (named after the ancient Egyptian goddess of the Nile).
OPNFV was the Foundation’s first fully telco-focused project, launched back in 2014, while CNTT was initially a joint venture with the GSMA, set up in 2019, but brought fully under the LFN wing late last year. There may be integration with further projects to come, with the common aim being to create a full, open source infrastructure platform for cloud-based networks, enabling operators to innovate and compete at the services layer.
“These two organizations really had a lot in common with CNTT focused on the specification requirements operational model and OPNFV doing a lot of the integration, working upstream with Istio and other open source organizations,” Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation, told SDxCentral. “We will continue to be focused on the infrastructure layer of the platform. What CNTT brings is a focused, converged operator view of what the infrastructure needs are, and OPNFV brings implementation to that.”
One of Anuket’s immediate goals is to help facilitate a consistent view of cloud-native technologies with respect to infrastructure and workloads, especially as deployments of 5G and edge accelerate in tandem during 2021.
OPNFV issued its final release as a standalone project in December 2020, and CNTT will be making its final release next month, while the first official release of Anuket will occur in the first half of this year.
Kirksey added that Anuket and ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) are now LFN’s largest projects and that scaling up such efforts helps to drive the “sort of integration engine that is very good at bringing in innovation, making sure it’s tested, making sure it works with the rest of the stack”.
As such, Anuket will develop “reference infrastructure specifications and conformance frameworks for virtualized and cloud native network functions, enabling faster and more robust onboarding into production, reducing costs, and accelerating telecom digital transformation”.
AT&T’s Al Morton, lead member of technical staff at AT&T Labs, and Walter Kozlowski, principal for cloud infrastructure architecture at Telstra, are the co-chairs of the transitional supervisory committee for Anuket, which has 28 members including, among the large operators, BT, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, Verizon, Vodafone and others.
It is not clear whether GSMA will still play an active role. When the two bodies set up their collaboration in 2019, it was seen as a strong sign of the traditional cellular community, represented by the operators’ organization, reaching out to the unfamiliar world of open source. Operators wanted to leverage open platforms to shake up their ecosystem, and GSMA, which has often sought to drive applications ecosystems, seemed to want to play an active role in driving the agenda.
With the question marks over a possible second year running without Mobile World Congress, it may be that the GSMA has bigger things on its mind, or that the effort will gain greater scale and focus under the control of a single body. It had already changed its focus once in its short life – last July, it changed the full version of its acronym from Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT) to Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce. This was designed to reduce the emphasis on NFV, which is increasingly seen as old-fashioned technology, to embrace the newer solutions based on cloud-native container and microservices architectures.
The aim of the CNTT is to ease the transition to NFV, and then to containers, for operators. Its founding mission statement was to “work closely with global service providers to define and create VNF reference architectures for NFVi (consisting of a global NFVi reference model, reference architecture, and global VNF certification lifecycle). The common NFVi reference architectures will be submitted to LFN for testing and verification via the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP).”
The decision to make the subtle but important name change was taken “to better reflect what role the group plays in the open source community and more closely tie the name to our actual objectives,” an LF spokesperson said at the time. “We are focused on establishing reference models and architectures for infrastructure to support cloud-based applications, in whatever form they take.”
The CNTT released its first reference architecture in autumn 2019, based on OpenStack virtual machine technology, and followed that, in summer 2020, with a new release of specifications, codenamed Baldy, which include its first container-based reference architecture, RA-2, supporting Kubernetes.
At the start of 2020, more than 80 organizations worked together to develop the world’s first 5G cloud-native proof of concept (PoC), under the auspices of LF. The organizations included telcos, developers, vendors and other LF members, which between them built all the elements of the live PoC. The Foundation was quick to contrast the speed with which this was created through cooperative, open processes, with the slow-motion pace of the traditional telecoms industry.
At the time, LF gave three pieces of advice to operators that want to thrive on the combination of cloud-native and 5G technologies. These are:
- Don’t use containers as yet another proxy for traditional telco devices
- Embrace more application-oriented cloud network design principles
- Fully use the CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) approach to application design and deployment.