Open Source MANO Release FOUR lands

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has dropped the latest iteration of its open source management and orchestration (OS MANO, or OSM) environment.

Landing just six months after release 3, OSM Release FOUR focuses on usability and interoperability, according to ETSI.

The features plucked out by ETSI in its release announcement are a reworked northbound interface, a “cloud-native” install, extra monitoring, and better modelling and networking logic.

The northbound interface in OSM has been rewritten to the ETSI NFV standard SOL 005. This standard [PDF] was published in February 2018, and includes API specs for management, lifecycle, performance management, fault management, and package management in NFV Release 2 environments.

ETSI says the northbound interface specs are available in the OpenAPI format to simplify interoperability for vendors adopting OSM Release FOUR.

The “cloud-native install” comes with a reduced footprint for better performance, more convenient event logging and diagnostics, and better stability. ETSI claimed a 75 per cent reduction in RAM consumption for the release.

There's also a redesigned GUI and a bunch of optional components at install, such as visualisation and VIM (virtualised infrastructure manager) sandboxing.

In monitoring, ETSI says OSM Release FOUR's alarm and metric settings are easier to use, and a new policy manager adds push notifications and reactive policy configuration, which the standards body says “opens the door to closed-loop operations”.

The monitoring module uses Apache Kafka as its message passing bus, and the module also implements a flexible plugin model so sysadmins can BYO monitoring environment.

ETSI Amazon CloudWatch and VMware vRealize will be added in a point release of R4.

Extensions to modelling include full IP profiles, MAC address configuration for non-cloud-native virtualised network functions (VNFs), VIM-assisted service function chaining, and using alternative images in public clouds.

There's a full technical description of OSM Release FOUR in this white paper [PDF]. ®