CNF Test Suite

Main

The CNF Test Suite is a tool that makes it possible to validate telco applications, aka Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs), and the underlying Telecom platforms adherence to Cloud native principles and best practices.

This Test Suite initiative works closely with the CNF WG which determines requirements for the CNF Test Suite program.

Installation and Usage

To get the CNF Test Suite up and running, see the Installation Guide.

To give it a try immediately you can use these quick install steps

Prereqs: kubernetes cluster, wget, curl, helm 3.1.1 or greater on your system already.

Install the latest test suite binary: source <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/cnf-testsuite/main/curl_install.sh)
Run setup to prepare the cnf-testsuite: cnf-testsuite setup
Pull down an example CNF configuration to try: curl -o cnf-testsuite.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/cnf-testsuite/main/example-cnfs/coredns/cnf-testsuite.yml
Initialize the test suite for using the CNF: cnf-testsuite cnf_setup cnf-config=./cnf-testsuite.yml
Run all of application/workload tests: cnf-testsuite workload

More Usage docs

Check out the usage documentation for more info about invoking commands and logging.

Cloud Native Categories

The CNF Test Suite will inspect CNFs for the following characteristics:

Configuration - The CNF's configuration should be managed in a declarative manner, using ConfigMaps, Operators, or other declarative interfaces.
Compatibility, Installability & Upgradability - CNFs should work with any Certified Kubernetes product and any CNI-compatible network that meet their functionality requirements while using standard, in-band deployment tools such as Helm (version 3) charts.
Microservice - The CNF should be developed and delivered as a microservice.
State - The CNF's state should be stored in a custom resource definition or a separate database (e.g. etcd) rather than requiring local storage. The CNF should also be resilient to node failure.
Reliability, Resilience & Availability - CNFs should be reliable, resilient and available to failures inevitable in cloud environments. CNFs should be tested to ensure they are designed to deal with non-carrier-grade shared cloud HW/SW platforms.
Observability & Diagnostics - CNFs should externalize their internal states in a way that supports metrics, tracing, and logging.
Security - CNF containers should be isolated from one another and the host. CNFs are to be verified against any common CVE or other vulnerabilities.

See the Test Categories Documentation for a complete overview of the tests.

Contributing

Welcome! We gladly accept contributions on new tests, example CNFs, updates to documentation, enhancements, bug reports, and more.

Communication and community meetings

Join the conversation on CNCF's Slack channels
- #cnf-testsuite
- #cnf-testsuite-dev
Join the weekly developer meetings
- Meetings every Thursday at 15:15 - 16:00 UTC
- Meeting minutes are here
Join the weekly CNF Working Group meetings
- Meetings on Mondays at 16:00 - 17:00 UTC
- Meeting minutes are here
Join the monthly Telecom User Group meetings
- Meetings on the 1st Mondays of the month
- Meeting minutes are here
Request an Intro to the CNF Test Suite here

Presentations

CNF Test Suite Demo

Recording
Slides (PDF)

Crystal in the Cloud: A cloud native journey at Crystal 1.0 Conference

Recording
Slides (PDF)

Implementation overview

The CNF Test Suite leverages upstream tools such as OPA Gatekeeper, Helm linter, and Promtool for testing CNFs. The upstream tool installation, configuration, and versioning has been made repeatable.

The test framework and tests (using the upstream tools) are written in the human-readable, compiled language, Crystal. Common capabilities like dependencies between tests and categories are supported.

Setup of vanilla upstream K8s on Equinix Metal is done with the CNF Testbed platform tool chain, which includes k8s-infra, Kubespray. To add support for other providers, please submit a Pull Request to the CNF Testbed repo.