Nokia has published the industry’s first complete templating system for VNF lifecycle management, designed to streamline and automate VNF onboarding, integration and lifecycle management processes.
The company said today’s methods for managing VNF lifecycles – instantiating, monitoring, repairing, scaling, updating and backing-up – are costly, cumbersome and time-consuming.
To address this, Nokia said it has developed an open templating system, aligned with the latest industry standards and open-source tools, to streamline these processes.
The template specifications allow service providers and VNF suppliers to take advantage of the automated lifecycle management capabilities of the Nokia CloudBand Application Manager, enabling them to integrate more VNFs faster while reducing the cost and time required to manage VNFs in the cloud.
Nokia’s open templating system builds upon the ETSI NFV specifications (IFA011 and IFA014), Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) specifications and OpenStack tools. It provides key functionality to service providers, including VNF definitions for better integration and added support of complex structures, and eliminates the need for customization when providing VNF information to a generic VNF Manager and NFV Orchestrator.
By supporting both Nokia and third-party VNFs, the system gives service providers a much wider selection of virtualized network services they can offer subscribers.
Nokia is currently collaborating with fellow members of ETSI and TOSCA to complete development of VNF templating standards to benefit the entire industry.
Ron Haberman, head of Nokia’s CloudBand product unit, said, ”One of the goals of NFV has been to foster an open ecosystem of VNF suppliers to give service providers maximum choice in the capabilities they integrate, and to offer subscribers the best available services.”