TR269 Onboarding Automation and Package Metadata R17.0.1

Automated software packages (e.g. VNFs, applications) onboarding has been cited as one of the top challenges for many service providers since the inception of NFV (Network Function Virtualization). The fact is that the characteristics and behaviors of a function once confined in a physical box, is now much more distributed and programable. The goal of transforming hardware appliances to become software-defined and virtualized is to exactly leveraging their ubiquity and programmability to achieve business and service agility.

To realize the goal of agility and automation, we need to understand a lot more on WHAT information need to be exposed by each function and HOW to describe them in a uniform way to automate. A well described package we called a “well-enabled package” the WEpackage.

However, the knowledge required to do so is beyond what any single organization will be able to cover.

This document introduces a structure for crowdsourcing WEpackage metadata specification, it provides seed information, vocabularies and recommended future work to initiate the effort.