I had the opportunity to present at Telecom Council's Comtech Forum on "Mobile Edge, MEC & The Olympics" in Sunnyvale on 6/21/18.
I hypothesized that ONAP will become a dominant automation platform for not just NFV/SDN services but also MEC applications. I speculated that over time, ONAP might include MEAO (mobile edge application orchestrator) and mobile edge platform manager functions. My conjecture is based on the following reason -- the edge cloud NFVI is going to be unified across VNFs and MEC applications. To me, it makes no sense to carve up a small edge environment into custom built servers distinct for different applications. That's the opposite of a cloud architecture going back to the PNF world! To get lower operational and capital costs, and to get high availability, it will be critical to have a single pool of similarly designed servers. Maybe a couple of flavors might work, but it doesn't make sense to have half a dozen hardware flavors. If you accept my argument that the NFVI layer will be generally uniform, then it makes no sense to have two orchestrators vying for the same NFVI resources. For this reason, I feel that an NFV/SDN automation platform such as ONAP and a MEC application orchestrator will have to be unified. Since ONAP is an open source community-driven project, it has a higher probability of being extended as compared to proprietary MANO offerings.
To be fair, I didn't completely cook this up. See China Mobile's presentation from the June OPNFV plugfest for similar thoughts (they didn't explicitly mention ONAP though).
Do you agree/disagree with me? Am I making sense here? I'd love to hear your feedback.
