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Why do users need nmaas?
Today’s network services are complex with heterogeneous network infrastructures and increasing numbers of value added services and features. Services are becoming increasingly mission critical for end users and the need to provide an integrated view of Network and Service Management will become vital.
The cost and complexity of developing and integrating in-house network management may be too high for many NRENs and institutions. nmaas aims to support these users to provide an effective, efficient network and service management platform.
What does nmaas Offer?
Network Management as a Service (nmaas) provides a portfolio of network management applications run on a per-user, secured network monitoring infrastructure.
GÉANT’s nmaas service includes three aspects:
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nmaas users are organisations that do not want to own NMS infrastructure themselves and/or want to outsource network management, as well as organisations and/or individuals that are searching for quality network management software or who want to share their software within the community. NMaaS provides multiple benefits, as a system, an application marketplace, and as a service.
nmaas simplifies domain network management by providing the infrastructure and tools via a cloud-based, multi-tenant and secure network management system. It enables the deployment of network management tools, as well as management and monitoring of client networks, although nmaas does not monitor and manage the network by itself.
The selection of tools that is and/or can be made available to users is not limited to network management tools and can be easily extended. With nmaas, users do not have to bear the ownership costs and risks related to maintenance and control of the network management infrastructure.
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- Supporting users in designing and implementing new use-cases on top of the nmaas platform.
- Maintaining nmaas open-source software repositories and public documentation websites.
Supported Use-Cases
nmaas serves as a general-purpose platform already powering multiple use cases across research and education:
Virtual NOC: deployment and management of network monitoring and operations tools (managed production instance: https://vnoc.nmaas.eu).
Virtual Lab: automated provisioning of online lab environments for education, training, and experimentation (managed test instance: https://vlab.dev.nmaas.eu).
Key Capabilities
Self-Service Deployment
Users can select applications from a curated catalogue and deploy them into isolated tenant environments with a few clicks, without requiring direct access to Kubernetes or infrastructure elements.Multi-Tenant Isolation
Each tenant operates in its own secure namespace, ensuring full separation of resources and configurations between users (e.g. organisations or teams).Extensible Application Catalogue
Administrators can easily extend the catalogue with any containerised application using Helm charts. The platform already supports a wide spectrum of applications - from development tools and databases to collaboration systems and monitoring solutions.GitOps-Driven Lifecycle Management
Each deployed application is backed by a dedicated Git repository, enabling configuration updates, version control, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows.Scalability and Flexibility
nmaas can be used as a managed service via GÉANT or self-hosted on user infrastructure.
