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 was originally developed by Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce (CNTT), and now is maintained and further developed by the RM sub-project of Anuket.

Problem Statement: Based on community consultations, including telco operators, technology suppliers, and software developers, there is a realisation that there are significant technical, operational and business challenges to the development and deployment of VNF/CNF network applications related to the lack of a common cloud infrastructure platform. These include but are not limited to the following:

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.

This document specifies:

Links to Reference Model specifications

Master copy: https://github.com/cntt-n/CNTT/tree/master/doc/ref_model

Current release (Elbrus); release date: 29 January 2021, https://github.com/cntt-n/CNTT/tree/stable/elbrus/doc/ref_model

Sign up to RM project

rm+subscribe@lists.anuket.io

Link  to RM calendar

https://lists.anuket.io/g/rm/ics/9786299/320306117/feed.ics

Work stream lead

Walter Kozlowski (Telstra) is the Works Stream Lead (WSL) for this project, email: walter.kozlowski@team.telstra.com

Regular meetings

Wednesdays @ 21:00 UTC

Link:  https://zoom.us/j/997256543?pwd=MWptM0F0Y1NpckhFVUgrZnM2TkJ0Zz09

2021 RM Meetings Agendas and Minutes

Anuket RM Meetings Minutes