IG1153 TOSCA for Onboarding and Lifecycle Management Automation R17.0.1

This white paper describes strategies to resolve the challenges surrounding the onboarding of software packages from vendors. Automation is imperative to the onboarding process. However, it remains elusive because every vendor is using their own approach to onboarding software packages instead of normalizing it. Moreover, the myriad ways of onboarding impedes interoperability in a multi-vendor environment of a service provider. When existing data models focus only on the technical metadata, and not the business and operational metadata, it exacerbates the issue to onboard software packages in an agile manner.

All these issues point to the lack of a similar approach to packaging and onboarding software packages. Therefore, this paper outlines a strategy that relies on OASIS TOSCA model to solve the problem.

This document entails the TM Forum position regarding OASIS TOSCA. At least initially, the main focus is with respect to the virtualization work within the TM Forum ZOOM project.