SDN, NFV and Network Automation

For quite sometime, there hasn't been any real standard for MANO-NFV Orchestration and Automation, granted that there are plenty of excellent proprietary solutions but there wasn't a real open Source reference architecture on this regard.  Somewhere around 2015, two main initiatives where created: ECOMP and Open-O. ECOMP was part the Domain 2.0 initiative which goal was to virtualize up to 75% of AT&T network by 2020 by leveraging cloud technologies (AIC, AT&T integrated Cloud) and network virtualization while reducing CAPEX and achieving operational  The main issue was that there was no playbook to follow for virtualizing and software-controlling a Wide Area Network, ECOMP was the biggest software project to AT&T to date, tasked to address these key issues. It stands for Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy . ECOMP is an infrastructure delivery platform and a scalable, comprehensive network cloud service.  It provides automation of ...

The joke goes around that the true meaning of SDN is Still Don't Know, there are different definitions, depending on who you ask, and three different kind of approach to SDN (SDN by overlays, SDN by APIs and Open SDN). As for the former, everyone agrees that SDN is a network paradigm that separates the control plane from the data plane, the differences are on the approach, protocols and semantics. As if that wasn't confusing enough, we also have multiple SDN controllers, some open source some proprietary but there is nowhere to be found a one to one comparison for features, pros and cons... but which one is which and whose are relevant and active in 2017. I will try to clarify some of these questions: Some closing thoughs:  OpenDaylight continues to show momentum OPNFV – embedded (so is ONOS, OpenContrail) Over 600 developers supporting and contributing Increasing number of customer deployments worldwide (AT&T, KT, Tencent, etc) Mostly datacenter-centric ...