12 May 2023
It was a really nice and fruitful meeting experience in which more than 120 contributions were discussed, comments exchanged, revisions reviewed, and consensus reached in just only 3 days. Several Release 4 and 5 work items made very good progress and were identified for reaching finalization status in the upcoming one or two months, including:
Release 4:
Feature (FEAT) 17 on “Cloud-native VNFs and container infrastructure management”, in particular on the new group specification (GS) development about CCM-VIM interfaces (work item DGS/NFV-IFA052),
FEAT20 on “NFV automation”, specifically for the new GS development on intent management service interface (DGS/NFV-IFA050) andFEAT21 on “NFV support for 5G”, with a special emphasis on the related normative work development to support PaaS services in NFV.
Release 5:
FEAT19b on “NFV connectivity integration and operationalization”, to continue the development of the new group report (GR) about NFV network connectivity (DGR/NFV-IFA035),
FEAT28 on “Fault Management models”, with the development of the new GS to define and specify alarms within the NFV context (DGS/NFV-IFA045), and
FEAT31 on “Flexible VNF deployment”, to steadily progress the normative work with change requests (CR) to update existing NFV-MANO specifications.
Other than these, below Release 4 and 5 work items also made some progress in this meeting, but the WG required to see more contribution inputs for determining when would the work items reach their stable drafts, including:
FEAT24’s new GS development on “VNF generic OAM” (as part of the work item DGS/NFV-IFA049),
FEAT19a on “NFV container networking”, under the umbrella of the new GR development on container networking (DGR/NFV-IFA043), and
The release independent work item on VNF management gap analysis with open source (DGR/NFV-IFA051).
With much time now spent on the work items, we expect more slots of future WG meetings will be available for accommodating new features and work items to be started as part of the upcoming Release 6. When telco virtualized networks are evolving towards cloud-native in this era, the conflicts between traditional standard development processes and more dynamic and agile requirements from cloud native world is increasingly prominent, which makes WG a focus point to resolve the conflicts and gaps.
The WG meeting also handled several contributions that influence general ETSI NFV ISG matters, such as the agenda proposal for a joint workshop with O-RAN planned to be held in June, improving the efficiency of the WG working procedures, offloading workloads among EVE, IFA and SOL working groups for better WG working coordination in the future. Some of the above discussions will provide valuable inputs for NFV future workshop sessions in the next NFV#42 plenary.
The time to parting is always reluctant, even more when WG colleagues have fallen in love with the daily supply of specialty drinks offered during the coffee breaks, lingered with some other local delicacies including the typical Bavarian pork knuckles that some of the delegates enjoyed at a social dinner. Delegates will start a new journey of next F2F meeting carrying the harvest from this meeting!
See you all in June at ETSI headquarters for our upcoming NFV#42 plenary!
