Out with ECOMP and Open-O, in with ONAP - Battle for Open Orchestration

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 many service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management, and SDN tasks.  It is designed to work with OpenStack but is extensible to other cloud and compute environments. ECOMP is the engine that powers our software-centric network.

There are 8 major software subsystems in ECOMP.  They cover areas like:

• orchestration of virtual machines (VMs) for compute, networking, storage, and measurement

• controllers that implement the network plan and configure and monitor applications; data collection and analytics that monitor KPIs and inform decisions on policy

• policy, where AT&T embedded intelligence, as a scaled network operator to help automate certain decisions

• all the data for the cloud infrastructure and the VNFs is collected in a geo-redundant data base, consisting of active and available inventory. 

• service design and creation – a design studio to facilitate service and infrastructure design, allowing re-use across the enterprise 

In 2016, AT&T decided to Open Source most of the code of ECOMP in order to advance the platform and a project that initially was proprietary AT&T software became Open Source.

The second major initiative, OPEN-O is seeking to offer network operators an incremental path to transform their networks, and OSS/BSS, through adoption of SDN and NFV without scrapping the vast investments in existing equipment and technologies.

The Open-O version 1.0 (2016) ushers in a new era of open orchestration, bridging the gap between virtualized functions and connectivity services for brownfield environments for both residential and enterprise virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE) use cases.



Who were the premier members of Open-O? China Telecom, Ericsson, VMWare, ZTE, Huawei, VMWare, China Mobile and HKT.

Late in 2016, the head of both communities decided to merge the initiatives and the "love baby" of ECOMP and Open-O became ONAP. What is ONAP? It is stands for Open Network Automation Platform.

ONAP brings together Open ECOMP and Open-O projects as a comprehensive platform for real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly create new services. By consolidating member resources, ONAP will deliver a unified architecture and implementation, with an open standards focus, faster than any one project could on its own. Who is on board with ONAP? Pretty much all the original heavy weights plus some more.  Its platinum members are operators like AT&T (investing over $200 Million on this joint venture just in 2017), China Mobile, China Telecom and Hardware providers like Cisco, Nokia, Ericsson plus software companies like Amdocs and VMware.