Category: ONAP

What’s missing from the ONAP community — an open design process

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about ONAP and its future releases recently. This is in the context of trying to implement a system for a client which is based on ONAP. Its really hard though, because its hard to determine how various components of ONAP are intended to work, or interoperate.

It took me a while, but I’ve realised what’s missing here…

OpenStack has an open design process. If you want to add a new feature to Nova for example, the first step is you need to write down what the feature is intended to do, how it integrates with the rest of Nova, and how people might use it. The target audience for that document is both the Nova development team, but also people who operate OpenStack deployments.

ONAP has no equivalent that I can find. So for example, they say that in Casablanca they are going to implement a “AAI Enricher” to ease lookup of data from external systems in their inventory database, but I can’t find anywhere where they explain how the integration between arbitrary external systems and ONAP AAI will work.

I think ONAP would really benefit from a good hard look at their design processes and how approachable they are for people outside their development teams. The current use case proposal process (videos, conference talks, and powerpoint presentations) just isn’t great for people who are trying to figure out how to deploy their software.

How to maintain a local mirror of ONAP’s git repositories

For various reasons, I like to maintain a local mirror of git repositories I use a lot, in this case ONAP. This is mostly because of the generally poor network connectivity in Australia, but its also because it makes cloning a new repository super fast.

Tony Breeds and I baked up a script to do this for OpenStack repositories a while ago. I therefore present a version of that mirror script which does the right thing for ONAP projects.

Continue reading “How to maintain a local mirror of ONAP’s git repositories”

On Selecting a Well Engaged Open Source Vendor

Aptira is in an interesting position in the Open Source market, because we don’t usually sell software. Instead, our customers come to us seeking assistance with deciding which OpenStack to use, or how to embed ONAP into their nationwide networks, or how to move their legacy networks to the software defined future. Therefore, our most common role is as a trusted advisor to help our customers decide which Open Source products to buy.

(My boss would insist that I point out here that we do customisation of Open Source for our customers, and have assisted many in the past with deploying pure upstream solutions. Basically, we do what is the right fit for the customer, and aren’t obsessed with fitting customers into pre-defined moulds that suit our partners.)

That makes it important that we recommend products from companies that are well engaged with their upstream Open Source communities. That might be OpenStack, or ONAP, or even something like Open Daylight. This raises the obvious question – what makes a company well engaged with an upstream project?

Read more over at my employer’s blog…