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Designing new, generic OSS platform: Need inputs

• Hi, Im tasked with designing a new, generic OSS platform which would serve as the common OSS for a few telecom products (mostly billing/charging/policy control products, which are  developed at various parts of the world) in our company. The fundamental requirements are as follows: - The framework must provide generic Agent entities for the whole of FCAPS and it must be possible for any product to install this agent entity in the Network Element and adhere to the interface specs of the Agent entity. Once this is done, the NE must become manageable from the central OSS - The Manager part of the OSS must be scalable, extensible and also support rich GUI as OSS client - All aspects of FCAPS to be supported - The platform must be created by making the best use of relevant standards and open source technologies I intend to create a platform by combining the best of open source tech in each of the FCAPS domains and weaving a application integrating them. The following is the summary of what I have investigated in this domain till now and my related questions: 1) Configuration/Provisioning: Netconf is the ruling standard here but not very easy to implement. Puppet and Chef are the most widely used frameworks which are quite extensible. Which of these netconf/puppet/chef is the best bet for config/provisioning management 2) Performance Management: Ganglia seems to be the best bet here. The OpenTSDB platform promises to be very scalable because it uses Hbase. 3) OSSJ standards from TMF along with its reference implementations are also interesting 4) DMTF has its own standards and some implementations I would like to have some expert opinion on what are the best standards and open source technologies to use/adhere when designing an OSS platform today. Thanks & Regards, MK

• Answer:

  As you develop your new state of the art platform you will also need to consider the trends in the Industry.  Most Telecommunication CSPs are now "trying" to embrace a digital strategy to remain relevant. If a snake cannot shed it's skin then it simply dies.  Your new OSS platform will need to take into consideration:-- SDN - NFV - Cloud (SaaS / PaaS / IaaS / XaaS)If we look at open-source technology then I would consider using Hadoop/Storm/Spark/NoSQL.  For OSS, the name of the game is now Analytics that will provide a "near" realtime trigger to the End User. Trawling through information could lead to a new Campaign (Product Package) to the end user. Hadoop (HDFS) can be used to help to obtain information in the File System. Storm / Spark can be used to provide Analytics (Customer Experience Management).Well proven open-source Databases are MongoDB and Cassandra.  Highly scaleable. For complex analytics an instance of the dB can be taken for onward processing.OSS application is divorced from a Hardware Platform.  As Cloud is key,  Openstack is a good start to provide the Compute, Storage and Networking capabilities. Openstack is basically a distributed Cloud Operating System.For rapid integration to different Network Elements an open source ESB should be considered. This adds to the flexibility.  JBOSS FUSE (Redhat) is a good candidate.Layered architecture approach should be used with Mediation, Data, OSS applications and Analytics clearly separated.Configuration should use NetConf and SNMP.   Ideal for SDN.  OpenDayLight project is using NetConf for SDN.YANG data model should be considered for Provisioning.As your solution will be based around Cluster / Grid then Ganglia is a well proven open source monitoring software.For standards you should consider ITU TMN and eTOM / SID / TAM.The ITU-T TMN models define management layers and focuses on general network management functionality.    eTOM (OSS business processes) focuses on managing operations, services, and interactions between the various components and building blocks. eTOM defines three major building blocks:-Operations (OPS) Strategy, Infrastructure, and Product (SIP) Enterprise Management (EM)