I’ve been thinking a fair bit about ONAP and its future releases recently. This is in the context of trying to implement a system for a client which is based on ONAP. Its really hard though, because its hard to determine how various components of ONAP are intended to work, or interoperate.
It took me a while, but I’ve realised what’s missing here…
OpenStack has an open design process. If you want to add a new feature to Nova for example, the first step is you need to write down what the feature is intended to do, how it integrates with the rest of Nova, and how people might use it. The target audience for that document is both the Nova development team, but also people who operate OpenStack deployments.
ONAP has no equivalent that I can find. So for example, they say that in Casablanca they are going to implement a “AAI Enricher” to ease lookup of data from external systems in their inventory database, but I can’t find anywhere where they explain how the integration between arbitrary external systems and ONAP AAI will work.
I think ONAP would really benefit from a good hard look at their design processes and how approachable they are for people outside their development teams. The current use case proposal process (videos, conference talks, and powerpoint presentations) just isn’t great for people who are trying to figure out how to deploy their software.