The Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) issued Dublin, its fourth release, and provided new details about how more than 15 major carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Orange, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and Swisscom are using the open source networking stack.

“The key [with the Dublin release] is the commercialization and the fact that we continue to increase deployments with certain carriers and others are in [proof of concept],” said Catherine Lefevre, ONAP technical steering committee chair and assistant vice president at AT&T.

ONAP’s previous release, Casablanca, added a cross-carrier blueprint and a 5G blueprint. Dublin adds a broadband service blueprint as well as new 5G and cross-carrier virtual private network (CCVPN) features.

“Swisscom drove the broadband service use case,” Lefevre said. This new blueprint demonstrates multi-gigabit residential connectivity over a passive optical network using ONAP. Swisscom’s deployment uses ONAP for higher degrees of automation including service design, customer self-service, and closed-loop assurance.

The CCVPN blueprint now includes the dynamic addition of services and bandwidth on-demand.

Dublin also adds to the 5G blueprint with new features including physical network function support, performance management, fault management (PM, FM) monitoring, homing using the physical cell ID (PCI), and progress on modeling to support end-to-end network slicing in future releases.

“Dublin brings 5G network automation for secure, standards-aligned global deployments on any cloud of any size or location,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, orchestration, edge and IoT, at the Linux Foundation. It supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Openstack, and Kubernetes-based clouds, he added. And it aligns with several open source standards including 3GPP, ETSI NFV ISG, ETSI ZSM ISG, MEF, and TM Forum.

Other telcos and service providers rolled out new production deployments of ONAP during the Dublin release cycle. For example, AT&T used ONAP to improve consumer mobility services, and Orange used ONAP to monitor the quality of network management systems access across several European countries. Additionally, Equinix in partnership with Ciena is in proof of concept for end-to-end application automation using the software stack and KDDI will soon test a Dublin environment for close-loop data collection, analytics, and events.

“And we have a whole commercial ecosystem that has reached a tipping point,” Joshipura said. Aarna Networks, Amdocs, BOCO, Huawei, and ZTE announced pure-play ONAP distributions or products based on ONAP. Meanwhile, Accenture, Ampere, Arris, Ciena, Ericsson, iconectiv, Netsia, Nokia, Pantheon, Ribbon, Rift, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro all announced ONAP demos and support services.

In addition to announcing the availability of ONAP Dublin, the open source project also added new members: Aarna Networks, Loodse, the LIONS Center at Pennsylvania State University, Matrixx Software, VoerEir AB, and XCloud Networks.

Next up is El Alto, which ONAP plans to release later this year. It will include minor requirement updates focused on ONAP's platform maturity requirements around stability, security, scalability, and performance.