Implementing a holistic approach to facilitate the onboarding, deployment and validation of NetApps

Abstract

The 5G system promises to deliver an environment for applications and markets that can easily capitalize on the new services and advanced interfaces that the 5G developments introduce. Recently, in the context of European research and innovation actions, the term NetApp was introduced. A NetApp, in the context of the 5G System, is defined as a set of services that provide certain functionalities to the verticals and their associated use cases. While there is no specific standard for describing the NetApp concept, the ETSI NFV model is adopted to describe the delivery and deployment of NetApps. This work presents an approach for automating the deployment and testing of NetApps in the context of the 5G system. The envisaged process focuses on innovations related to the operation of experiments and tests across several domains, providing software support tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) of NetApps and their artifacts in a secure and trusted environment.

A network application approach towards 5G and beyond critical communications use cases

“…To experiment with such solutions, several projects propose architectural frameworks (Arampatzis et al, 2021;Martinez-Alpiste et al, 2022) and experimental testbed facilities' augmentations and workflows (Iordache et al, 2022;Margetis et al, 2022) to facilitate Network Applications' deployment, in tandem to the vertical systems under test. A common paradigm, followed across 5G PPP initiatives, toward simplifying this implementation and deployment of Network Applications is the adoption of a DevOps (Development and Operations) methodology driven by a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practice (Patachia-Sultanoiu et al, 2021;Trantzas et al, 2021;Koumaras et al, 2022;Trantzas et al, 2022). These favour a workflow for microservices architectural-style design and containerized deployment of network services and applications (Grigoriou et al, 2022;Margetis et al, 2022).…”

Towards a Fully-Fledged Validation of 5G NetApps

“…This way, NetApp developers may rely on these tests to validate their NetApps. Furthermore, they can also onboard their tests to complement the tests already offered by 5GASP [4].…”

“…5GASP's approach relies on Robot Framework 4 tests to evaluate the functional behavior of a NetApp and its security. Such tests must be onboarded alongise the NetApp artifacts to 5GASP's NetApp Onboarding and Deployment Service (NODS) [4].…”