If you have read my earlier post or have been involved in the Tacker project, you will probably know that Tacker allows users to build a Generic VNF Manager (VNFM) and a NFV
Orchestrator (NFVO) to deploy and operate Network Services and Virtual
Network Functions (VNFs) on an NFV infrastructure platform like
OpenStack. And that it is based on ETSI MANO Architectural Framework and provides
a functional stack to Orchestrate Network Services end-to-end using
VNFs.
My friend and I were fortunate enough to be selected for one of the hands-on sessions for the recently concluded OpenStack Summit in Austin. We demonstrated some of the basic functionalities and capabilities of Tacker during the hands-on session. We hope that
it was useful for those who attended our session.
We clearly under-estimated the number of people who showed up (in the range of 150) and did not prepare enough USB sticks to go around the tables. I hope we mitigated some of the inconvenience with our private OpenStack Cloud and WiFi access point. We will definitely post the lab material online and send the download instructions and links to the participants if we get a chance to conduct another hands-on session in future Summits (this is our first Summit). Having said that, you can check out our recorded lab session in YouTube. The lab manual and Virtualbox images for our session can also be found here.
The Tacker Core team gave some really nice talks during the Summit. New features such as support for multiple VIM zones and support for NUMA, Huge Pages etc were also show-cased. Those are the cool stuff =D
One of the questions that many participants asked me during the hands-on session was what is the difference between Heat and Tacker. I think a plausible answer is that Heat is OpenStack centric. In the case of Tacker, it uses TOSCA templates to build generic VNFM and NFVO which will also work on Cloud platforms other than OpenStack. I understand from other discussions that Tacker can also model actual physical hardware like router in an existing environment. This is something that Heat will not be able to achieve (since we are talking about actual and not virtual router here).
Like everyone else, I am learning as I go along ;-)
All in all, it has been a great experience as my friend and I get to listen to, meet and interact with many experts and like-minded people who attended the Summit =)
Cheers!
/Anthony
