Amdocs has been helping the Canadian service provider Bell to automate its data center tenant network provisioning using the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).

The Linux Foundation announced in December that Bell deployed an open source version of the ONAP code in a production environment.

Ragu Masilamany, VP and head of network virtualization with Amdocs, said he couldn’t speak specifically about Bell's automation of data center tenant network provisioning. But he did explain the use case in general.

A tenant is a standard OpenStack term, referring to a group of compute nodes. These nodes can be virtual machines (VMs) or containers.

“When you have to build a large number of tenants, you need to be able to network those tenants to your production network,” said Masilamany. “Any operator building a large cloud infrastructure with network payloads needs to be able to spin up VMs or containers and connect those tenants to the production network so they can deploy useful use cases.”

ONAP, by its very name, allows operators to connect virtual networks to each other and to the physical network. And the open source software can instantiate and configure the network in an automated way. Bell is focused on providing its operations teams with tools to automate life cycle management of both physical and virtual network functions.

Amdocs is helping Bell to advances its DevOps goal of using continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD).  Masilamany said that because ONAP is open source code, it needs to be updated frequently and ingested into a service provider’s environment faster. With Bell, “We decided to build this CI/CD pipeline so they can ingest open source faster,” he said. The work involved coding, scripting, and using other open source tools, as well.

The work between Bell and Amdocs has resulted in software that serves as the foundation for the ONAP Operations Manager (OOM). It’s one of the approximately 30 projects within the ONAP Amsterdam release. “It’s about streamlining the way one installs ONAP,” said Masilamany. “When ONAP was started there were a large number of servers needed to get ONAP up and running. We worked with Bell and contributed one-click deployment of ONAP using Kubernetes infrastructure. We’re getting really close to being able to run on one physical server.”

He said OOM will go mainstream in the ONAP Beijing release scheduled for this summer.