BARCELONA, Spain–MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS—GigaSpaces, provider of pure-play cloud orchestration and data scalability platforms, announced today a new open source and open governance framework, ARIA (Agile Reference Implementation of Automation). ARIA will serve as a reference implementation of TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), a leading cloud-agnostic templating model, developed by the OASIS Foundation.
A primary goal of ARIA is to provide a TOSCA reference implementation for a series of open source orchestration projects, including the OPEN-O project announced today.
ARIA, like TOSCA, was born out of the need for a vendor- and cloud-neutral orchestrator that supports portability and interoperability. ARIA is designed to accelerate development around the TOSCA specification, advance its adoption, demonstrate simplified portability of TOSCA orchestration and increase agility through more rapid community contributed iterations.
o date, organizations looking to build cloud application orchestration and NFV strategy based on TOSCA application modeling have needed to learn and apply the TOSCA specification independently. This created many proprietary interpretations that are not always compatible, and it has inhibited TOSCA’s cloud portability benefitse.
Through ARIA, application vendors will be able to test and run their applications easily, from blueprint to dployment, without the challenges of developing the orchestration engine, thus simplifying TOSCA certification and validation. Also, the Cloudify team has integrated YANG data modeling with TOSCA so the two can communicate seamlessly. A single model for both service modeling and traditional network device configuration is now possible, bringing together the worlds of NFV and SDN.
Through the open governance model of ARIA, community code contributors will help shape the specification and its implementation, prioritize use cases to handle, and influence the technical direction the project takes.
Supporting Comments
“As a leading NFVI platform provider, VMware is committed to open and interoperable NFV solutions. TOSCA is fast becoming a leading standard for cloud automation. ARIA is an important step toward making TOSCA a standard for VNF Management as well. By integrating TOSCA with YANG modeling, ARIA also brings the worlds of NFV and SDN automation together in a single controller. We are pleased that ARIA integrates well with VMware vCloud NFV and will provide our VNF partners with open, cost-effective automation on our platform,” said David Wright, vice president of operations, Telco NFV Group at VMware.
“The objective of the ARIA project is to provide an open, common and simple code base that can be easily embedded into other projects through a single library to ensure compatibility among different projects and orchestration platforms,” said Nati Shalom, CTO ofGigaSpaces. “This will allow ISVs to incorporate TOSCA as part of their own offering as well as allow the NFV and SDN community to innovate faster in the area of open orchestration and MANO across cloud environments and in multi-VIM deployments.”
“The Communication 4.0 era features the full convergence of IT and CT. It relies on NFV and SDN as the key technical enablers for automatic deployment and agile operation. The orchestrator functions as the top part of them, interconnecting with traditional NMS to manage end-to-end network resources. By embracing open source and closely cooperating with partners from both the IT and CT sectors, China Mobile is expecting that the project will develop state-of-art, open-source orchestrator-layer software, which consolidates its technology strength in NFV and SDN and facilitates IT-oriented transformation of telecom operators,” said Li Zhengmao, executive vice president of China Mobile.
About ARIA
ARIA (Agile Reference Implementation of Automation) is an open source and open governance reference implementation of a TOSCA orchestrator. The ARIA community was formed to advance adoption of the TOSCA standard and accelerate the industry’s journey towards application orchestration in cloud environments. ARIA was created for application vendors to test TOSCA models on an easy to use, free and open source orchestrator. It is also intended for enterprises and telecoms interested in TOSCA orchestration to advance the spec adoption and easily demonstrate portable TOSCA orchestration. More at http://www.ariatosca.org/.