Objective

The Reference Architectures define all infrastructure components and properties which have an effect on the virtualised services design, deployment, and operations.  The Reference Architecture for Virtualised Cloud Infrastructure (RA1) specifies an OpenStack based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud architecture. The document specifies the components of a conformant IaaS cloud platform: a selection of OpenStack projects (capabilities), the resources, and the interfaces exposed to the workloads.

Problem Statement

Over the past few years, the telecom industry has been going through a massive technology revolution by embracing software defined networking and cloud architecture principles in pursuit of the goal of achieving more flexibility, agility and operational efficiency. At a high level, the main objective of NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) is the ability to use general purpose standard COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) compute, memory and storage hardware platforms to run multiple virtualised network services (Virtualised Network Functions - i.e. VNF / Cloud Native Network Functions - i.e. CNF). Earlier common infrastructure models based on the previous assumption that networking applications are typically built on discrete hardware, do not offer the level of flexibility and agility needed for the support of newer networking technologies such as 5G, intelligent networks and Edge computing.

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By running network services as software on commodity hardware, rather than purpose-built hardware, the operators aspire to realise operational efficiencies and capital expense savings. These virtualised network services are increasingly being used by telecom operators to support their internal and customer facing network infrastructures. The need for a Common Cloud Infrastructure model across the industry to facilitate rapid adoption of cloud is clear.

Scope

The diagram above shows the different types of specifications and how they relate to the different elements of a typical cloud platform stack. RA1 builds upon the Reference Model (RM) specifications, and details:

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Life Cycle Management (LCM): including but not limited to configuration management, logging, monitoring, and alerting.

Link to Reference Architecture Specifications

The RA1 documentation is available here.

Regular Meetings

Normally, Every Monday (check Calendar) 1530 UTC

Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/99279174971?pwd=eWozNENnYkpLSXdRSzZvblNKVU1wdz09

Meetings Agenda and Minutes

The Agenda and Minutes are available here.