Sophia Antipolis, 26 July 2023

The ETSI Open Source MANO community is proud to announce OSM Release FOURTEEN. Release FOURTEEN is a Long-Term-Support (LTS) release of ETSI OSM, providing two years of continuous support with bug fixes and security patches, and including significant improvements in many key areas.

This release offers a new scalable architecture for service assurance based on Apache Airflow and Prometheus and includes closed loops for auto-scaling and the handling of alerts coming from the Network Functions. In addition, the new architecture enables scheduled monitoring and service-assurance workflows, as well as alarm-based on-demand workflows. This capability will be key to supporting new telco cloud use cases in future Releases.

Release FOURTEEN brings significant improvements in security, usability, platform management, infrastructure modelling and lifecycle management of network functions.

Security enhancements:

  • Secured Helm-based Execution Environments (EE) with authenticated gRPC communication channels between EE and network functions.
  • Use of pod admission policies to restrict EE permissions in the OSM cluster.
  • Replacement of Pycrypto library by PycryptoDome, a more modern and secure cryptography library.

Usability and platform management:

  • Enhancements in user management such as the generation of standard audit logs for every user operation from any entity interacting with the OSM North Bound Interface.
  • New retry and password expiry policies for user management.

Infrastructure modelling and network function lifecycle management:

  • New capabilities for network service deployment, such as the ability to attach multiple volumes to different virtual machines and to re-use existing flavors.
  • Simultaneous support of IPv4 and IPv6 in network interfaces of virtual machines.
  • Ability to provide instantiation parameters to Juju-based Kubernetes Deployment Units.
  • Optimized interactions with Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM) allowing for faster and more reliable deployments.
  • A new connector for Transport-API WAN Infrastructure Managers (TAPI WIM), supporting the use of TeraFlowSDN or any other TAPI WIM to build optical transport connectivity between datacentres.

OSM installation experience:

  • Community installer now deploys OSM components leveraging on a parametrized Helm chart, instead of just plain Kubernetes manifests. This improvement allows for much simpler upgrades of OSM services.

OSM client:

  • Support of different output formats for some commands and replacement of Pycurl library by the well-known Requests library for HTTP interaction. Both features were developed by participants in the recent OSM#15 Hackfest for developers held in Castelldefels in June 2023.

Release FOURTEEN represents a significant milestone for ETSI OSM. The community continues to drive innovation in the telecommunications industry, delivering powerful open-source solutions for orchestration and management of virtualized network functions.

To know more about this Release, join our webinar on 12 September, 3pm CEST: https://www.etsi.org/events/2261-osm-release-fourteen-overview-a-new-scalable-architecture-for-service-assurance