Canonical at the 9th OSM Hackfest

To all telecommunications service providers, global system integrators, research institutions, OSM community members and innovators all over the world: heads-up! The 9th OSM Hackfest starts in a few weeks and Canonical will as always be there. We will lead hackfest sessions, answer any questions you may have and help drive the evolution of the OSM project. Due to the COVID-19 complications all over the world, the event will be once more 100% remote. It will take place from 1st to 5th of June. The registration is already open, so do not wait any longer and register at the following page. We are looking forward to meeting you “there”.

OSM (open source MANO) is an open-source project that enables telcos with MANO (management and orchestration) capabilities for software-based network services. It is hosted by ETSI and supported by 15 global telecommunications service providers. There are 140 organisations involved in total, including Canonical. During the last months, we have seen an increasing commercial interest in OSM as well as initial approaches to onboard real telco workloads on it. The project is taking off right now.

9th OSM Hackfest: the agenda

The following section provides a brief summary of the agenda for the 9th OSM Hackfest. For the first time in its history, the hackfest is going to be fully dedicated to network service end-to-end onboarding. The sessions related to OSM architecture, installation and administration will be available on the project website in a form of offline videos. For more information, you can refer to the official agenda on the ETSI website.

Day 1 – June 1st

The hackfest starts on Monday, 1st of June at 2 PM CET with the official welcome session. It is an opportunity to hear about the current state of the project, the vision of the leadership group and the directions where it is heading. The session will follow with the lab environment setup. Later, users will learn how to manage network service packages with the new OSM repository feature. They will also explore how the end-to-end onboarding process looks like for hybrid network services based on the EPC (evolved packet core) example. The day will wrap up with sessions about building a multi-VDU (virtual deployment unit) VNFs (virtual network functions) with an initial configuration and network service monitoring capabilities in OSM.

Day 2 – June 2nd

This is going to be the most interesting day for the Canonical team. We will lead various sessions related to implementing primitives for VNFs and CNFs (container network functions) in OSM. Those primitives enable performing post-deployment operations of network services and are implemented using charms. This will also be an opportunity for attendees to learn how the Python Operator Framework, that was presented during the OSM MR#8 Hackfest, simplifies the process of writing charms in practice. The sessions about primitives in OSM will follow with adding auto-scaling and alerting to network service workloads.

Day 3 – June 3rd

Day 3 is going to start with sessions about enabling high performance on network service workloads and the cooperation of OSM with leading SDN (software-defined networking) platforms through the SDN assist feature. Later, participants will learn about placement automation and slicing of network services. Finally, the end-to-end testing process will be discussed and the complete onboarding process will be reviewed. The day will wrap up with an open 90-minute Q&A session. Participants will be able to ask any question to the OSM experts leading hackfest sessions. 

Day 4 – June 4th

The hackfest itself will finish on Wednesday afternoon, however, on Thursday the participants will have an opportunity to join the OSM Ecosystem Day. During this event, various OSM community members, including Canonical, will present their vision for OSM evolution as well as their strategy for NFV (network function virtualisation) in general. This allows the participants to get an overview of the bigger picture than OSM itself.

Day 5 – June 5th

During Day 5, the participants will be able to join the technical sessions led by various OSM community members. During those sessions feature requests are presented, discussed and priorities according to the community needs. This will also be an opportunity to hear about the upcoming events. This includes OSM release EIGHT and the next OSM hackfest.

Find us at the 9th OSM Hackfest

Usually, you would just need to look around and find people wearing orange Ubuntu t-shirts, but this time it is obviously not the case. You can find us on OSM Slack, however, at any given time. Simply ping Canonical product managers: Alex Chalkias and Tytus Kurek, or one of our MDLs (module development leads): David Garcia or Mark Beierl. We are always available and happy to chat with you about OSM, NFV or any other telco-oriented topics. 

Canonical has been involved in OSM development since the foundations of the project. As one of the top contributors, a TSC (technical steering committee) member and an owner of the N2VC (network service to VNF communication) and DevOps components, Canonical remains one of the key members of the OSM community.

To try OSM before the hackfest, read the following tutorial.

For more information about Canonical’s solutions for telcos, refer to our website