Lessons Learned From Being the First ONAP Training Developer

As the first ONAP training provider that has trained around 60 participants on ONAP (and OPNFV) and created the LF online ONAP/OPNFV courses, we have definitely learned a few lessons!

Here are some observations:

• Covering the entire ONAP project in half-day of lectures is definitely packing in a lot. There is a lot to digest; however, participants seem to be able to keep up. Areas such as VNF onboarding, OSS/BSS interfaces, closed-loop automation seem to generate the most questions.  
• Creating labs was challenging for us. ONAP + OPNFV require more resources that a laptop can provide. To make self-service labs possible for online LF courses, we had to install both these software stacks on one VM in a public cloud. This took multiple man-months of effort. Also, we had to create numerous workarounds for issues with the ONAP Amsterdam OOM release. I'm confident all of this will be a lot simpler with the Beijing release.  
• We initially thought that the vFW demo -- from ONAP+OPNFV deployment to vFW network service deployment could be completed in 0.5 day. We were so wrong! The entire lab end-to-end is more like 1.5 days which would make the overall course a 2 day course instead of 1 (given 1/2 day of training). We had to cut the lab down twice to make everything fit in 1 day. And based on the ONS training experience, we will need to trim the lab a little more.

Being a pioneer around ONAP has been both challenging and fun! If you are interested in ONAP/OPNFV training or professional services, do not hesitate to contact us.