Prerequisites

To start an application deployment we should understand the resources demand (number of nodes (VMs or pods), CPU, RAM, etc.) of the application based on the information obtained from the application owner/vendor, taking availability requirements into account (Disaster Recovery, High-Availability, Geo-Redundancy, etc.).

Make sure that application has sufficient documentation describing

for VNF

Application topology - the amount and types of VMs (nodes), networks, storages, other environment objects, communication matrix
Network security rules
Affinity/Anti-Affinity requirements
Application configuration (Described for Ansible, Chef, Saltstack, Puppet, etc.)
Application lifecycle operations sequences
Target architecture for each environment
Security requirements (secrets Management, separation of Prod and Test environments or private runners, security hardening, etc.)

for CNF

Application topology - the amount and types of pods (StatefulSets, DaemonSets ), storages, other environment objects, communication matrix
Network configuration and Network Policies ( Services )
Target architecture for each environment (Network setup, worker nodes resources, etc. )
Deployments Affinity/Anti-Affinity specs
Configuration options (ConfigMaps, workloads, secrets, etc.)
Deployments lifecycle sequences.
Security requirements (secrets Management, separation of Prod and Test environments, security hardening, etc.)

* Most of the questions may be answered by provided Helm chart. If you don't have prepared and tested charts (or analogs) your team probably will need to write configuration from scratch. And to do this you will need to clarify information about the target application, pointed in the list above.

Make sure that you have a DevOps engineer in your team with the following skills

for VNF

Basic understanding of CI/CD concept
Knowledge of software development applications (e.g. Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket, etc.) that enables Concurrent DevOps, making the software lifecycle faster and radically improving the speed of business
Knowledge of OpenStack
Knowledge of configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc.)
Understanding of Infrastructure as Code concept

for CNF

Understanding of Infrastructure as Code concept
Basic understanding of CI/CD concept
Knowledge of software development applications (e.g. Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket, etc.) that enables Concurrent DevOps, making the software lifecycle faster and radically improving the speed of business
Knowledge of Kubernetes
- Kubernetes networking
- container runtime (containerd, Docker, CRI-O)
- management of Kubernetes workloads ( Kubernetes YAML manifests, Helm, Kustomize, etc.)
- continuous deployment tools ( Argo CD, Flux, Jenkins X, Tekton ... )

Make sure you have some services available for smooth operations

Certificate Authority with support for full certificate automation lifecycle (issuing, renewal, revocation)
Secret Management service
Log Management platform
Metrics and Observability platforms

Vendor requirements

If you're a vendor, you should take a look at the following requirements: