 Hello everybody. This is a panel on CNTT. In this panel we're gonna discuss how does telco industry benefit from the CNTT and OPNFE outcome. In this panel we'll talk about the background about CNTT, the goals and what its charter is and so forth. And with me I have three panelists. I am gonna be the moderator. My name is Sikdev Kapoor. I work at a Juniper Networks. I'm a distinguished engineer. I'm also on a technical steering committee of tungsten fabric as well as a Crano edge stack. And along with the fellow panelists I'm one of the active contributors to CNTT. So having said that Walter, would you please introduce yourself? Yes Walter Kozlowski. I'm the principal cloud architect at Telstra in Australia. In CNTT I play a few roles but I'm leading reference model development which we'll be talking about this. My name is Karen Sevilla. I work for Orange. I'm a network architect for Cloud Infrastructure and in CNTT I'm contributing to the reference model and I'm co-leading the application. Thomas you want to introduce yourself? Yeah sure. I'm Thomas Fredberg. I work for Ericsson and I'm a senior expert in cloud and IT data center infrastructures. All right very good. Thank you. And now let's get into our panel discussion. So I'm gonna open it up for the benefit of those people who may not be familiar with CNTT. So Walter since you are the lead of one of the work streams in CNTT so I'm gonna start by asking you the first question. So in terms of CNTT's view so what is CNTT for the benefit of people? What is its history, its goal, what it is trying to achieve and how it is collaborating with the sister open source communities. So would you mind walk us through please? Yes obviously very you know complex question but let's just try to make it sure that we can make it very quickly. If you look at this virtualization and containerization of network functions it's not anymore in experiments it just moved to mainstream technology now interested. That means that the third industry expects the technology will actually safely efficiently and inexpensively support the demands of 5G IoT Edge and another business which we are in. If you think about is that virtualized continuous cloud infrastructure it seems to be considered now the basic enabler for telco operators business current and future. From my experience and I think that probably you will share that whoever has been engaged in architecting, delivering and operating infrastructure cloud environments have faced some extremely challenging dilemmas like you know how all those components should be the layers should work together how to avoid vendors lock-in how to actually you know meet the requirements performance requirements which are very stringent and basically you know how to look for some strategic advice where to go for. That was the painful experience of the network operators that led to the formation in June 2019 of the cloud infrastructure task force CNTT within the Linux Foundation networking. So its mission from the beginning was to help operators, technology suppliers, innovators and other parties alike in this rough journey. This goal seems to be simple but it's critical for our business and for the future. It is actually to show the way by building a generic flexible and concrete model that can spawn a select but limited number of reference architectures that can be actually implemented and validated through a defined industry compliance process. CNTT has created initial reference model defined infrastructure and workload profiles capabilities and measurements and map them together in in one document. When building the first version of this document we had in mind and basically infrastructure as a service VM based actual open stack architecture. The latest the current Barak release which is actually released right now and moved to a more hybrid model where actually we have to work for the coexistence between you know different type of limitations infrastructure service containers as a service. Quickly we have to work with other projects in LFN like Odin Allup and other organizations like GSMA and Etsy. Speaking about GSMA the reference model is actually being published as we speak as a GSMA document which will actually open this into the industry and this so the work has already started. Thank you. So this is GSMA so whatever the work which we are doing that will become the actual specification the formal specifications correct? Yeah correct as a PRD permanent reference document in GSMA. Perfect thank you. So now I'm going to shift towards Karin since you represent an operator so from the operator's view point of view would you tell us keeping operator view in mind how does CNTP outcomes benefit operators you know how would the usage outcomes the conformance the RFPs RFIs and what not so would you mind walking us through that perspective? Yes sure so from from the beginning the CNTP has adopted a pragmatic approach and it's about to provide content usable for the telco industry. So why is it of great interest for operators and I will speak about orange in this in my case. So as said by Walter operator with cloud infrastructure in production or forced to note that is not as easy and as rapid as expected to integrate workloads on their infrastructures and within orange we we spent too much time tuning and testing our infrastructure in order to integrate workloads so we think that it's a good idea to standardize telco cloud infrastructure and it would help it will help to integrate workloads and it will help us to reduce our operational costs. So how can we use the CNTP outcome with this objective in mind? So CNTP specification give guidance to build a standardized telco cloud infrastructure it gives a instatter to develop and implement this infrastructure and a conformance test suite to validate the deployments. So we want to concentrate on your small numbers of cloud infrastructure to simplify the ecosystem and it's a reason why we are we are requesting we are adding this the compliance to CNTP in our RFPs for instance we are requesting NAVI and VNS vendor to become compliant to CNTP requirements and we think that it will allow to simplify our task and to make our lives easier. It's the first point and the second point of interest for for orange and for the operators I think it's a test automation it's essential for us and since the entity is taking advantage of community like OPNV community which already provides a lot of work to in order to implement and test NAVI and taking benefit of all this work and for instance all that's that's done in projects like fun test, RCEP or NAVI bench is big interest for us so within orange we are already running on our infrastructure the test suites provided by OPNV and we ask our suppliers to do the same and it guarantees that the infrastructure we deploy support all the capabilities we need for workloads so it's a way we are using the CNTP outcomes. Yeah and and we hear all the operators are gonna down the road mandate you know that all vendors must have the conformance to CNTP to be considered for eligible for RFPs. Yeah so thank you thank you for clarifying that so now I'm gonna turn to Thomas since you represent a vendor so let's let's talk from a vendor's perspective like what does it mean what does CNTP mean for for a suppliers or a vendor who's providing the VNFs and the NFVI infrastructure. Sure, I mean CNTP for us is a great place to discuss with the telecom market about future requirements the solution space and the technology content to come and I think that in this telecom space the cloud era really changes things where the vendors and the operators have to align more than previously around what the existing and developing technologies we are to use so that we can put requirements on hardware and software vendors as well as open initiatives open source initiatives and there I think we have to realize that a lot of the developing technologies here are driven by large industries like the hardware vendors with their CPUs and accelerators and the software industry with a lot of software as well as systems like Kubernetes and so on so forth and a lot of these are not driven by us as telcos anymore neither vendors nor operators but the requirements space are very much driven by the hyperscalers in some cases high performance computing which means that we got to work together as a complete market segment to have any chance of getting any sort of an impact on this and that's why the up front work needs to be working together as a big community to have an impact and get our add-ons. I think it's very very important as well that we understand that the additions we make should be true additions so that we get an easy to operate in a multi-vendor infrastructure where as Karim talked about we can have Jigans also forth to ensure that the telco workloads work in a smooth way but early adoption requires early alignment as well so that when we do our technologies bit as vendors those won't be too much changed because then we just go into system integration for all the diversive type of implementation. When it then comes to the matured solution then to have a reference architecture to have a conformist test suites also means simpler tests for ourselves and fewer diversive solution to support so I think it's great for us. Yeah so it's kind of a win for both you know so it it conforms to vendors operators requirement and it also simplifies things for the vendors so that everybody can confirm. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for that. That's the main idea. Perfect. That makes sense. Okay so now I'm gonna change the subject a little bit and so as the technology is evolving every day I remember when we started with CFDT over the time new technologies have evolved and new things are coming up and so this question I'm going to open up to all of you guys so whoever wants to take it first that's fine so what is in the future of CNTP and how do we as a body as a CNTP body how do we plan on coping up with the technology evolution so Walter you want to take it first? Yeah I'm gonna be shot on this right here while the technology is developing at the speed of light as we know and it's actually very hard to predict what's going to happen you get some ideas and we want to tell them as Thomas was talking about this as well once one one thing is for sure that from reference model and reference architecture and then the corresponding implementation we will have to change them and develop them right and examples you know the accelerations technologies programmable networks will coming in SDN next generation SDN so all the fits it's hanging on us and all of this will be driven probably by 5G IoT and other use cases. One thing which I'm sure is that this access of projects like this will depend on the community involvement in this work so that will be done a call for the audience actually to start contributing to this project. Back to you. Yeah another example is like for instance a networking group which you actually started last year right when you saw the need for SDN which we eventually folded into RM so that's another example of the technology evolution. So Karin what would you want to add to that? So for us yes the CNT is the right place to speak about the future of technology and the evolution we want to see in our networks so yes for us we are counting on CNT to develop and to contribute to the coming of new solutions from operators. Yeah Thomas what would you like to add to it? Yeah I think that Waldron Karim mentioned a lot of different things here and I think to summarize that there are a lot of new technical challenges coming up I think we are going from a homogeneous type of deployment in the beginning of the cloud to a more heterogeneous deployment of more type of hardware different virtualization paradigms which is necessary to bring out the efficiency because I think that the name of the game now once we have transitioned into the cloud is to gain both operational efficiency as well as cost operation and the bits and pieces in there to get them power efficient for instance and we got to get in more hardware building blocks smartnecks GPUs FPGAs which is what CNT is currently working with we got to support the cloud nativeness we got to support the more automation within the cloud infrastructure layers and on top of that we got the distribution coming with all the different edge sites but I think to to cope with this in the standardization jungles here and we got to work pretty hard to work together and align ourselves and what to use what technologies to use when to use them and ensure that we get in the new type of the interfaces coming to be more and more intense based as well so it's going to be a very interesting time ahead for us I think yeah I remember like when we started CNTB at the beginning the main emphasis was an open stack based reference architecture and then as we progressed we moved towards the cloud native RA2 and then as we were moving along we recognized the networking unit and we formed the networking working group and as we were moving forward we recognized that we need to address the edge the edge use cases and we formed the edge working group so so in other words over time this body has continued to evolve and and address the the use cases as as they've been coming along one of the round the challenges is that quite often we are talking about cloud native technologies which were not really designed for the telco networking right and that's a major challenge we've got now in reference model and reference architecture how to make them really no telco enabled yeah yeah like near and near examples of this right yeah yeah so like near and dear to telcos is the the multi-tenancy which is kind of a challenge in the in the cloud native Kubernetes word and and and and many such similar issues so I think the body is evolving so so having said that I want to open it up for the question for the general audience before I do that let me quickly talk about how to contribute for those people who are listening to this and they are curious that they want to check it out what what this body has put out and if you want to become a part of this community and you want to contribute let me share a slide here to show you as to how you can contribute to to this body you know so there is a github you know you can go to github cntp and and and you can see the the reference model the reference architecture conformance all of these four work stream for every single one of them which which walter and others covered earlier so so you can pick and choose whichever area you're more interested in or you can look at the overall documentation of cntt and all of that information is there you can ping any one of us walter is that the lead for for reference model we all are all four of us a very active contributor and most of these work streams so you can reach out to us or or or you can send out a message on the generic email list for cntp and there are many ways to get involved so we would love you to come and join us and and participate with this now i'm going to uh turn it over to the the general audience for to ask the questions how he started recording again