Do You Know What the Future Holds for MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration?

by network-devel

For Amartus, July involved a lot of work with MEF to help define the next-generation of Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), a key initiative of the MEF’s Third Network vision.

What’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration, or MEF LSO?

MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) has been designed to give service providers a software-defined mechanism for management and control of network services across multiple network domains.

The aim is to improve SPs’ ability to remotely and automatically deliver end-to-end connectivity services. Currently, service creation is a manual process that oftentimes involves hands-on equipment configuration that can take weeks or months. With LSO, service providers will be able to achieve the same-day service deployment, and in many cases with no remote visit necessary.

MEF Aims to Define the Future of LSO

Bartosz Michalik, a software architect and MEF-certified engineer from Amartus published an article in Converge! Network Digest about the future of LSO.

The article, titled “MEF aims to define the future of Lifecycle Service Orchestration”, was based on his experience contributing to the LSO Presto standards definition effort, as well as on his work at MEF hackathons, where software architects and developers from the networking industry hold a group-coding session to solve critical issues.

In the article, Bartosz provides an overview of the LSO architecture, which depends on functional blocks and ‘LSO Reference Points,’ i.e. the logical points where different functional management components interact.

These reference points facilitate communication between components such as business applications, service orchestration functions (SOF), or infrastructure management and control applications (ICM). Included in this architecture is the Presto Management Interface Reference Point, which provides north-south network resource provisioning.

Annual MEF Members Meeting – Toronto 2017

This architecture and related application programming interfaces (APIs) were discussed at the MEF Annual Members Meeting, which took place in Toronto from July 24-27, 2017. Further discussions and another edition of the Hackathon will also take place at the MEF17, which this time will be held in Orlando, FL, from Nov. 13-16.

A contingent of Amartus executives participated in the MEF Annual Members Meeting, including CEO Marcin Paszkiewicz and VP of Sales and Marketing Liam Twomey.

The Amartus team contributed to some of the MEF’s major work areas, including Third Network Services SD-WAN project.

For more information on this MEF work, download the latest “Understanding SD-WAN Managed Services” whitepaper.