Objectives
The Reference Model (RM) specifies a virtualisation technology agnostic (VM-based and container-based) cloud infrastructure abstraction and acts as a "catalogue" of the exposed infrastructure capabilities, resources, and interfaces required by the workloads. This document has been developed by Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce (CNTT).
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One of major challenges holding back the more rapid and widespread adoption of virtualised/containerised network applications is when the traditional telecom ecosystem vendors, while building or designing their virtualised services, are making their own infrastructure assumptions and requirements, often with custom design parameters. This leaves the operators being forced to build complex integrations of various vendor/function specific silos which are incompatible with each other and might possibly have different and conflicting operating models. In addition, this makes the onboarding and conformance processes of VNFs/CNFs (coming from different vendors) hard to automate and standardise. The need for a common model across the industry to facilitate more rapid adoption is clear.
Scope
This Reference Model document focuses on identifying the abstractions, and associated concepts, that are needed to represent the cloud infrastructure. The diagram below highlights its scope in more details.
