March, 15th 2017. SONATA 2.0 Release

SONATA officially announces the launch of its release 2.0, the third official software release delivered since the project started in July 2015.
SONATA is developing a Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) service framework that provides a programming model and development tool chain for virtualized services, fully integrated with a DevOps-enabled service platform and orchestration system. SONATA results include:

  • SONATA Service Platform, which accommodates Communication Service Providers’ needs in the new and much more challenging 5G environment.
  • SONATA Network Service Software Development Kit (SDK) that provides an invaluable set of tools for assisting developers in the development and testing of NFV-based services.


These SONATA building blocks complement each other in the context of next generation of mobile networks and telecommunication standards referred as 5G, focusing on optimal use of the available network and cloud infrastructure.
According to Jose Bonnet, Senior Technology Consultant at Altice Labs, “the new release of the SONATA platform offers higher operational efficiency, higher scalability and higher flexibility, which are key benefits in the 5G world”.
“SONATA’s approach is the first integral approach to service development and management in the NFV orchestration landscape, and brings a bunch of interesting concepts to the current common practice, especially in what relates to the new challenges posed by 5G”, Diego Lopez, Senior Technology Expert at Telefonica, Chair of ETSI NFV ISG and Co-chair of IRTF’s NFVRG, said.
SONATA’s outcomes are published in a public GitHub repository under Apache v2.0 license, a permissive license that guarantees full rights for adoption, modification and distribution. This software release is freely available for download and ready to be installed. Code and related technical documentation is available on the project website: http://sonata-nfv.eu.
“The developers put quite some effort in producing high quality code and keeping the technical documentation in a very good shape. We believe that this drives the adaption of SONATA and helps users to make the best out of it”, Michael Bredel, SONATA Technical Manager and Senior Researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe, says.
SONATA 2.0 Release main improvements
SONATA Service Platform

  • Tool for automatic and complete installation.
  • New Security policy (HTTPS and user registration).
  • New modules in the Gatekeeper that provide monetization capability and business intelligence support.
  • Function Lifecycle Managers and improved Specific Managers infrastructure in the MANO Framework.
  • Initial support of container-based VIMs, multi-PoP service deployment, Service Function chaining configuration and VNF image pre-deployment and management in the Infrastructure Abstraction Layer.
  • Extended monitoring functionality.
  • Improved Catalogues and Repositories.
  • Use of the platform’s GUI by Service Platform managers to managed VIMs.

SONATA SDK

  • Automated versioning of development setups.
  • Improvement in the validation functionality for detecting bugs in the developed network services/functions.
  • Updated SDK tools to support multiple platforms and authentication/security options.
  • The SDK emulator, key asset which provides a very rapid testing environment to deploy developed services, has been extended.
  • Additional debugging and monitoring functionality for easy inspection and visualisation of network interfaces and links.

About SONATA
SONATA project is an EU-funded project Horizon 2020 and part of the 5G-PPP initiative. The project has a 30 month work plan that started in July 2015. The consortium is composed of 15 partners representing the whole value chain of the Telecommunication Industry, as well as research and academic institutes.
SONATA is a collaborative effort contributing other open source communities and standards bodies that play and important role in the NFV (MANO) spectrum with the objective of widen the impact of the project. In the near future we expect to increase adoption with three pilots: vCDN, Security application and DDoS and Service Platform-to Service Platform.
“This software release is coming out less than six months after previous one, with multiple new features fully qualified and keeping the simple installation mechanism. It’s amazing to see the fast developments with a large number of contributors from 15 different organisations and locations across Europe”, says Josep Martrat, Coordinator of SONATA Project and Head of the Telecom Market at ATOS Research and Innovation. “The agile methodology and CI/CD strategy we embrace let us to release this open NFV framework that supports CPS in the digital transformation brought by software networks with rapid deployments of new services. “

About Optare Solutions
Optare Solutions’ business is related with Order Management processes in the telco environment. In SONATA, Optare is working on several Service Platform modules like BSS, Gatekeeper or the catalogues, and is participating in general discussions, decision-making and test pilots.
The SONATA project provides the opportunity to explore new technologies related to NFV and SDN that present new challenges in the order management area where old patterns of management are going to be changed in order to offer short time to market solutions. Moreover it will enable the ability to manage a broader set of technologies and use new patterns which accelerate the innovation such as DevOps.
Optare is working on the service and is acquiring the necessary skills to generate a knowledge base on the orchestration of network services using a micro-services infrastructure, offering services and products based on that technology. This approach will give Optare the possibility of offering these components in an agile way to the different customer that will request different orchestration capabilities. Also some models could be offered as a service, being a better business approach for Optare.
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