industry standards alignment

Accanto’s work is aligned with a number of key standards. Standards play an important role in ICT. This industry has set an ambitious goal which can be summarized as: ”Zero-touch service and network management”.

Realising that goal requires a level of harmonisation to ensure heterogeneous virtual functions can be onboarded quickly and managed in a common way. This in turn, enables lifecycle management systems to manipulate these flexibly without the need to develop costly and domain specific custom adapters.

Accanto contributes to the Open Source Lifecycle Initiative, established by IBM, to accelerate the innovation and adoption of a common  lifecycle model for virtual network services.

The Open Source Service Lifecycle Management initiative (OSSLM), enables service providers to provide automated, on-demand, and flexible virtualized services to meet customers’ evolving demands and expectations. It automates Virtual Network Function (VNF) and service lifecycle changes through an abstraction of the lifecycle functions.

Service providers are undergoing a business and platform transformation. They face many challenges as they look to generate revenue and improve operational efficiency. As a result, they require automated, on-demand, and flexible virtualized services to meet customers’ evolving demands and expectations.

To automate virtual network function (VNF) and service lifecycle changes, an abstraction of the lifecycle functions with a lifecycle manager is required. IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager based on Accanto technology resents the lifecycle management functions by using APIs. The Lifecycle APIs are the foundation for automating the lifecycle management of the VNFs and ultimately pave the way for automating operations to design, deploy, and operate VNF-based services.

This reference implementation provides working source code and documentation to speed up the adoption of the lifecycle concepts by other open source projects or communities. This project develops resource adapter implementations that are tested, and it enables VNF packages for the reference implementation. The reference implementation can be used to quickly enable those resource adapters and VNF packages with production lifecycle managers that implement the same APIs.

For further information about the OSSLM initiative, please click here.