Overview document created

The overview document targets to provide the reader with a basic understanding
on ONAP and its basic functional description.The doc also provides insight to
Benefit of ONAP, licenses needed, basic releases etc.
Issue-ID: DOC-364

Change-Id: I87c10896dc308d24d5aa8b54d920545372ffc41d
Signed-off-by: Noemi Wagner <noemi.wagner@nokia.com>

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+.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
+.. 4.0 International License.
+.. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
+.. Copyright 2019 Nokia; Copyright 2017-2018 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.; Copyright 2017 AT&T Intellectual Property.
+
+Open Network Automation Platform Overview
+=========================================
+
+The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project addresses the
+rising need for a **common automation platform for telecommunication, cable,
+and cloud service providers**—and their solution providers— that enables the
+**automation of different lifecycle processes**, to deliver differentiated
+network services on demand, profitably and competitively, while leveraging
+existing investments.
+
+Prior to ONAP, telecommunication network operators had to keep up with the
+scale and cost of manual changes required to implement new service offerings,
+from installing new data center equipment to, in some cases, upgrading
+customer equipment on-premises. Many operators are seeking to exploit
+Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
+to improve service velocity, simplify equipment interoperability and
+integration, and reduce overall CapEx and OpEx costs. In addition, the
+current, highly fragmented management landscape makes it difficult to
+monitor and guarantee service-level agreements (SLAs).
+
+ONAP is addressing these challenges by developing global and massive
+scale (multi-site and multi-Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM))
+automation capabilities for both physical and virtual network elements.
+It facilitates service agility by supporting data models for rapid
+service and resource deployment, by providing a common set of Northbound
+REST APIs that are open and interoperable, and by supporting model
+driven interfaces to the networks. ONAP’s modular and layered nature
+improves interoperability and simplifies integration, allowing it to
+support multiple VNF environments by integrating with multiple VIMs,
+virtualized network function managers (VNFMs), SDN Controllers, and
+even legacy equipment. ONAP’s consolidated VNF requirements enable
+commercial development of ONAP-compliant VNFs. This approach allows
+network and cloud operators to optimize their physical and virtual
+infrastructure for cost and performance; at the same time, ONAP’s
+use of standard models reduces integration and deployment costs of
+heterogeneous equipment, while minimizing management fragmentation.
+
+Scope of ONAP
+-------------
+
+ONAP enables end user organizations and their network or cloud providers
+to collaboratively instantiate network elements and services in a dynamic,
+closed control loop process, with real-time response to actionable events.
+
+ONAP’s major activities, that is designing, deploying and operating
+services, are provided based on ONAP’s two major frameworks, namely on
+Design-time framework and Run-time framework:
+
+.. image:: media/ONAP_main_functions.png
+    :scale: 40 %
+
+In order to design, deploy and operate services and assure these dynamic
+services, ONAP activities are built up as follows:
+
+* **Service design** – Service design is built on a robust design framework that
+  allows specification of the service in all aspects – modeling the resources and
+  relationships that make up the service, specifying the policy rules that guide
+  the service behavior, specifying the applications, analytics and closed control
+  loop events needed for the elastic management of the service.
+* **Service deployment** – Service deployment is built on an orchestration
+  and control framework that is policy-driven (Service Orchestrator and
+  Controllers) to provide automated instantiation of the service when
+  needed and managing service demands in an elastic manner.
+* **Service operations** – Service operations are built on an analytic
+  framework that closely monitors the service behavior during the service
+  lifecycle based on the specified design, analytics and policies to enable
+  response as required from the control framework, to deal with situations
+  ranging from those that require healing to those that require scaling
+  of the resources to elastically adjust to demand variations.
+
+ONAP enables product- or service-independent capabilities for design,
+deployment and operation, in accordance with the following foundational
+principles:
+
+1. Ability to dynamically introduce full service lifecycle orchestration
+   (design, provisioning and operation) and service API for new services
+   and technologies without the need for new platform software releases
+   or without affecting operations for the existing services
+
+2. Carrier-grade scalability including horizontal scaling (linear scale-out)
+   and distribution to support large number of services and large networks
+
+3. Metadata-driven and policy-driven architecture to ensure flexible and
+   automated ways in which capabilities are used and delivered
+
+4. The architecture shall enable sourcing best-in-class components
+
+5. Common capabilities are ‘developed’ once and ‘used’ many times
+
+6. Core capabilities shall support many diverse services and infrastructures
+
+7. The architecture shall support elastic scaling as needs grow or shrink
+
+Functional overview of ONAP
+===========================
+
+The following guidelines show the main ONAP activities in a chronological order, presenting ONAP's functional structure:
+
+1. **Service design** - ONAP supports Service Design operations, using the TOSCA approach.
+These service design activities are built up of the following subtasks:
+ a. Planning VNF onboarding – checking which VNFs will be necessary for the required environment and features
+ b. Creating resources, composing services
+ c. Distributing services - Distributing services constitutes of 2 subtasks:
+   * TOSCA C-SAR package is stored in the Catalog
+   * new service notification is published
+
+2. **Service orchestration and deployment**
+  a. Defining which VNFs are necessary for the service
+  b. Defining orchestration steps
+  c. Selecting valid cloud region
+  d. Service orchestration calling cloud APIs to deploy VNFs
+   * The onboarding and instantiation of VNFs in ONAP is represented via
+     the example of onboarding and instantiating a virtual network function
+     (VNF), the virtual Firewall (vFirewall). Following the guidelines and
+     steps of this example, any other VNF can be similarly onboarded
+     and instantiated to ONAP. See :ref:`virtual Firewall Onboarding and
+     Instantiating <vfirewall_usecase>` examples.
+  e. Controllers applying configuration on VNFs
+3. **Service operations**
+  a. Closed Loop design and deployment
+  b. Collecting and evaluating event data
+
+Benefits of ONAP
+================
+
+Open Network Automation Platform provides the following benefits:
+
+* common automation platform, which enables common management of services and
+  connectivity, while the applications run separately
+* a unified operating framework for vendor-agnostic, policy-driven service
+  design, implementation, analytics and lifecycle management for
+  large-scale workloads and services
+* orchestration for both virtual and physical network functions
+* ONAP offers Service or VNF Configuration capability, in contrast to other
+  open-source orchestration platforms
+* the model-driven approach enables ONAP to support services, that are using
+  different VNFs, as a common service block
+* service modelling enables operators to use the same deployment and management
+  mechanisms, beside also using the same platform
+
+ONAP Release information
+========================
+
+ONAP is enhanced with numerous features from release to release. Each release
+is named after a city.
+
++----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
+|Release Name          |Release version |Release Date          |Features delivered                                         |
++======================+================+======================+===========================================================+
+|Casablanca            |* 3.0.2         |* 31 January 2019     | :ref:`Casablanca Release Notes <casablancarelease-notes>` |
+|                      |* 3.0.1         |* 30 November 2018    |                                                           |
+|                      |* 3.0.0         |* 15 April 2019       |                                                           |
++----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
+|Beijing               |2.0.0           |7 June 2018           |                                                           +
++----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
+|Amsterdam             |1.0.0           |16 November 2017      |                                                           +
++----------------------+----------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
+
+ONAP Blueprints and environments
+================================
+
+ONAP is able to deploy and operate VNFs running OpenStack based Centralized Private Cloud Instances, as well as Mobile Edge Cloud instances.
+ONAP has been tested in the following network environments:
+
+* Voice Over LTE (VoLTE)
+* Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)
+* 5G
+* Cross Domain and Cross Layer VPN (CCVPN)
+* Broadband Service (BBS)
+
+Licenses
+========
+
+Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) is an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
+
+ONAP Source Code is licensed under the `Apache Version 2 License <http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>`_.
+ONAP Documentation is licensed under the `Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
+International License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>`_.