Happy Birthday, ONAP: Celebrating One Year of Collaborative Network Automation

This month marks the official one year anniversary for the ONAP project and community.  In just one year, ONAP has moved quickly from new project to production implementations at AT&T and Bell Canada in market in the first nine months alone, which is no small feat! I am incredibly proud of our vibrant and productive community for coming together so quickly and collaboratively to reach this milestone and many others.

Though we are still growing and learning to work even more closely with other open source networking projects across the stack (see my blog post on LFN), we have much to celebrate in ONAP’s first year:

• Enables  60% of the world’s mobile subscribers: With the addition of Verizon earlier this year, ONAP now supports 60% of the globe’s mobile subscribers, marking it the de facto standard network automation platform.
• Welcomed more than 60 members in its first nine months alone.
• Achieved strong developer participation: As of March 2018, 459 different individuals have contributed code to ONAP.
• Delivered  a unified patorm: In November, ONAP issued its first code release, Amsterdam, which merged two separate, existing projects and re-architected the code base into a single, flexible and modular platform. Amsterdam delivers a unified architecture for end-to-end, closed-loop network automation, which is becoming a mandatory requirement before 5G and IOT deployments.
• Received Open Source Rookie of the Year Award: Just last week, ONAP became an “Open Source Rookie of the Year” honoree from Black Duck Software. This honor is given to some of the most innovative and influential open source projects launched during the previous year, in recognition of its success and momentum, as well as  affirmation of its prospects going forward.

But it’s not just about statistics —  what we’re really celebrating is the community at large, and what it represents: ONAP is one piece of a larger strategic initiative, serving as the glue that binds open source networking together. What ONAP brings to the table — a unified platform for  closed-loop automation — is built on years’ of collaborative efforts across open source projects and communities. ONAP is the first open source project to unite the majority of operators (end users) with the majority of vendors (integrators) in building a real service automation and orchestration platform.

Real-World Implementations

To that end, we are pleased to see more ONAP implementations since the Amsterdam release in November. From early deployments, testing, and POCs that leverage various modules of the pre-and post-release code are leveraging ONAP. This follows pre-Amsterdam activity by member carriers and vendors including Amdocs, AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, China Telecom, Fujitsu, Huawei, Orange, and Vodafone.

Members are also iterating and testing blueprints of use cases like VoLTE and residential vCPE. A demonstration of how to use ONAP Amsterdam to design, orchestrate, and manage the VoLTE use case — a complex end-to-end, real-world service composed of multiple VNFs from different vendors based on the ETSI NFV architecture — will be available onsite at ONS in the LFN booth.  ONAP and Kubernetes will also be demoed together in the CNCF booth at ONS, showing the best of network automation and cloud native orchestration by enabling ONAP deployments to any public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Looking Ahead

As we enter our second year, the community is working vigilantly on the second code release, ONAP Beijing, due out late spring. More use cases are also in the works. If you are attending ONS, please stoy by the LFN booth to learn more about ONAP and how we’re bringing together network and cloud operators and technology providers from around the globe to deliver an open, standards-driven architecture and implementation platform.