MEF16 LSO Hackathon revisited

The Euro16 LSO Hackathon in April was only the second in a series of MEF-facilitated LSO Hackathons and the third has just been announced for November of this year.

The events are focused on accelerating development of Third Network services based on LSO, SDN, NFV, and CE 2.0 (Carrier Ethernet 2.0) services encapsulated in OpenLSO (Open Lifecycle Service Orchestration) scenarios and OpenCS (Open Connectivity Services) use cases.

OpenLSO scenarios express the capabilities required by service providers to orchestrate end-to-end services as described by MEF specifications and are essential elements in the lifecycles of Third Network services.

According to a recent MEF report, Euro16 LSO Hackathon teams worked on two major OpenLSO scenarios:

• Inter-Carrier Ordering: LSO Hackathon participants successfully initiated an order for a CE 2.0 Access EPL service between a service provider and a network operator across the LSO Sonata Reference Point that supports management and operations interactions between network providers. They also provided valuable feedback to progress MEF work on standardised ordering of CE 2.0 services. The team included representatives from AT-T, Ciena, Ericsson, CableLabs  and Amdocs.
• Service Function Chaining: LSO Hackathon participants demonstrated injection of a virtual firewall into a live CE 2.0 E-Line service using TOSCA templates. This innovative approach – which was the first time that Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) have been injected into a CE 2.0 service in the LSO Hackathon environment – involved collaboration with MEF members working on LSO Presto Network Resources Provisioning (NRP) APIs. Representatives from Gigaspaces, Cisco, Huawei, NetCracker, Telecom Italia Sparkle, CenturyLink, and Iometrix took part in this effort.

Charles Ecket is co-editor of the Euro16 LSO Hackathon report, he believes the event is a great industry driver.

"The event proved to be a very effective way to bring together key contributors from multiple standards organisations and open source projects to work toward a shared goal of accelerating development of Third Network services over open, automated, virtualised, and interconnected networks," says Ecket.

"This is exactly the type of collaboration we need to drive the industry forward."

The next LSO Hackathon will take place at the MEF16 global networking conference held between 7-10 November, 2016 at the Hilton Baltimore inner Harbour Hotel.