Popular Open Source NFV Orchestrators

NFV Orchestrators play a critical role in the life cycle management of Virtual Network Functions in the Telco Cloud. A number of open source orchestrators and communities are solving the orchestration challenge - trying to simplify the onboarding / orchestration process for the operators, through standardization and automation.

Community Name: Openstack

• Started in: 2010
• Description: OpenStack is a cloud operating system that manages large volumes of compute, storage, and networking devices in a datacenter, supporting infrastructure orchestration capabilities. Many service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica and Vodafone have built their Telco Cloud infrastructure using OpenStack. OpenStack is used as the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the ETSI NFV Reference Architecture.
• Current Status: Very active community (Several 1000s of member companies and developers are actively contributing to the community.
• Key Drivers: AT&T, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Rackspace, Red Hat,  SUSE and Tencent Cloud.

Community Name: Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) 

• Started in: 2017
• Description: ONAP Platform provides capabilities for design, creation and lifecycle management of network services - both physical and virtual. It was formed by integrating the ECOMP framework opensourced by AT&T and the Open-O open source community. 
• Current Status: 125+ active contributors to the community.
• Key Drivers: Amdocs, AT&T, China Mobile, Bell Canada and a bunch of service providers / network equipment vendors. 

Community Name:  Open Source MANO (OSM) 

• Started in: 2016
• Description: Open Source MANO project is delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models. 
• Current Status: 100+ active contributors to the community. There are 49 member companies and 67 participant companies in the forum. 
• Key Drivers: Telefonica and a bunch of service providers / network equipment vendors. 

Community Name:  Open Baton 

• Started in: 2015
• Description: Open Baton is yet another ETSI compliant open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack. It is very lightweight and can be used for developing quick prototypes. Open Baton has its roots in the Open SDN Core Project.  
• Current Status: 30+ contributors to the community. 
• Key Drivers: Telefonica and a bunch of service providers / network equipment vendors. 

Here is our assessment of the various open source orchestrators available in the industry today:

• OpenStack is well established as an infrastructure orchestrator and adopted by several leading enterprises and telcos. 
• ONAP is relatively new and is far from being "production grade", though service providers like Bell Canada have done a limited production deployment of ONAP. 
• OSM has been there for a while, however since the launch of ONAP, OSM is losing its shine. Telefonica is aggressively looking at a system integrator who can make OSM production grade. 
• Unlike ONAP/OSM which was developed by network equipment vendors and service providers, Open Baton was developed by Research Institutes from Europe. It is currently used in a couple of community projects. Open Baton was somewhat popular in 2016/2017, but it lost its fanfare once ONAP emerged in the market.  

2019 is going to be the deciding year for the Open Source Orchestrators. ONAP picked up a lot of momentum in 2018. We've to wait and watch if ONAP really gets any adoption by service providers in their production environment. That is going to be the litmus test for ONAP.