SS7 firewall and IMS onboarding automation

Together with long-term partners and clients, Aspire successfully finished SS7 firewall and IMS onboarding automation project within the planned timeframe and resources. 

The work on the project scope was not without challenges. During the first part of the project, the Aspire lab in Dublin was used to mitigate the lack of access to the client lab which was not provided. The documentation was not complete, and coding was particularly difficult due to challenges with Open-Source MANO (OSM), which were overcome and fed back into the wider OSM community. 

Despite all the challenges, the project team accomplished several key achievements: 

• 5 Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) were migrated within the SS7 firewall solution and 11 VNFs within the fixed IMS solution (almost every VNF has multiple clusters, and the overall number of VMs created is more than 100) 
• More than 1000 lines of infrastructure-independent code were developed and incorporated into the client workload 
• A workaround was created to resolve the Open-Source MANO (OSM) bug – the default action reboot was not working as expected (confirmed by OSM developers), and the project team found a workaround that allowed the project to be finished on time! 

The quality of the work performed transformed into tangible values for the clients. The automation of the onboarding process is allowing the clients to deploy a complete solution of SS7 firewall or IMS fixed in a few hours instead of manual deployments which are measured in months, which results in significant OPEX reduction and decreased “time to market” period. The developed code is infrastructure-independent, so the clients can use this code to deploy a solution on any cloud environment (OpenStack, AWS, Azure, VMware…), thus providing maximum flexibility in their future infrastructure evolution. And in the end, timely completion of onboarding automation activities is a prerequisite for a wider IMS migration program timeline. 

We congratulate the members of the project team from all sides on the amazing work, professionalism, and technical skills applied during this engagement and wish them success in future projects!