VMware, Intel and Cloudify to sponsor the first VNF On-Boarding Hackathon at Mobile World Congress; a critical new initiative to accelerate the adoption of telecom services over virtualized infrastructure.
VMware, Intel and Cloudify will be hosting an open VNF on-boarding hackathon at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). The hackathon aims to accelerate cloud-based telecom service deployments by addressing one of the key challenges of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV); the ease of onboarding Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).
There is currently no de-facto industry standard for deploying a VNF on to a particular Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM), be that a native VMware, OpenStack or another VIM. As a result, the onboarding process can be labour intensive and require an in-depth knowledge of both the chosen Management and Operations (MANO) software as well as the VIM architecture. This in turn impacts the cost, speed and accuracy of new service deployments.
TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) blueprinting is a proposed methodology for moving towards industry standards for VNF definition and Telecom’s Service blueprinting for Management and Operations (MANO) solutions in both the Open Source and commercial NFV communities.
By building portable TOSCA templates and using MANO solutions that support TOSCA, VNF onboarding becomes agnostic to both MANO and VIM vendor. The time required to onboard new VNFs, and hence bring new services to market, can become significantly reduced, less costly and de-risked.
The goals of the hackathon are to raise industry awareness and initiate an industry review of a proposed TOSCA based VNF Data Models agreement, provide easy to use tools to assist in the adoption of TOSCA as an NFV blueprinting standard and to begin a web based archive of downloadable TOSCA blueprints for the participant VNFs
VMware, together with Cloudify and Intel are developing a set of web based tools that make generating basic TOSCA blueprints as simple as filling out a web form. The hackathon will walk delegates through the use of the tools to achieve three outcomes:
- Create a basic TOSCA blueprint for their VNF
- Customize the blueprint with more advanced settings[NS2]
- Working with other participants, combine VNF blueprints into a fully featured Network Service Blueprint.
Why is this initiative important?
Without a standardized model, VNF integrations with an ever-changing landscape of MANO solutions and VIM vendors, will result in VNF vendors and operators building ‘snowflakes’ – unique integrations that are complex, costly to develop and difficult to deploy and support.
Using the proposed solution, VNF vendors can create portable TOSCA templates that are optimized for their VNF and make them publicly available for use by customers and integrators to rapidly deploy services. This encourages customer self-service and breaks down barriers to VNF deployment.
This community driven effort also allows VNF vendors authoring blueprints for their own VNFs to learn from the community and incorporate best practices in to their own blueprint.
How to get involved
The hackathon will be of interest to the following people:
As a hands-on activity:
- VNF, MANO and VIM vendor technical staff
- NFV developers, open source contributors, people who love NFV and coding!
As a learning opportunity to see how you can leverage easy onboarding of VNFs for your company:
- CTOs, Director of Sales Engineering, Engineering Managers, Technical Product Managers, Sales Engineers, etc.
Please email [email protected] to request your place in the VNF Onboarding Hackathon. Space for the hackathon is limited; so please apply soon.
Agenda at a glance
- Wednesday March 1st, 2017
- 2:30 – 3:00 Theater Session
- 3:00 – 5:30 VNF Onboarding Hackathon
- 5:30 – 6:30 VNF Hackathon Reception, sponsored by VMware
The event will start with a 30 minute theatre presentation on Wednesday March 1st at 2:30pm at the VMware booth Hall 3, Stand K10. VMware, Intel and Cloudify [NS4] will present the various initiatives they are working on in order to make VNF Onboarding easier. All are welcome to attend the theatre presentation.
Then we will move to the VMware’s VIP hospitality area at the booth to begin the hackathon event at 3:00pm. Immediately following the Hackathon, we will be hosting a reception for participants to stay for some wine, beer and tapas to relax after the day’s activities.
Join VMware, Intel and Cloudify at this event to collaborate and build out TOSCA blueprints for NFV deployments.
