nmaas – Platform for On-Demand Application Deployment
(formerly: GÉANT Network Management as a Service
(nmaas)
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.
nmaas is an open-source, multi-tenant orchestration platform for automated deployment and management of containerised applications in the cloud or on private infrastructure. It enables institutions, research organisations, and service providers to quickly deploy and operate a wide range of applications through a unified, self-service portal.
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 layers.Multi-Tenant Isolation:
Each tenant operates in its own secure namespace, ensuring full separation of resources and configurations between organisations or departments.Extensible Application Catalogue:
Administrators can easily extend the catalogue with any containerised application using Helm charts. The platform 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 version control, configuration tracking, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows.Scalability and Flexibility:
nmaas can be deployed as a managed service (e.g., via GÉANT) or self-hosted on institutional infrastructure. It supports both cloud-native and hybrid deployments, adapting to diverse operational environments.
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.
Virtual Lab: automated provisioning of lab environments for education, training, and experimentation.
Benefits
Reduces complexity and manual effort in application deployment.
Provides consistent, reproducible, and auditable environments.
Enables faster innovation through self-service access to ready-to-use applications.
Offers flexibility between managed and self-hosted operation models.
GÉANT’s nmaas service
includes GÉANT’s nmaas service includes three aspects:
- Providing, managing and maintaining the infrastructure of the nmaas service portal, platform and selected tools.
- Supporting users in using the system, and the selected tools for monitoring their networks via nmaas.
- Supporting users that contribute their software to the nmaas system .
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.
Using a multi-tenant approach, each NREN or institution has private access to their network and services from a highly available cloud based platform.
Find out more about the service...
