• Proposed name for the project: Model Oriented Virtualization Interface
• Proposed name for the repository: movie
• Project Categories: (Requirements)

While OpenStack is a competitive candidate for VIM, existing interfaces provided by OpenStack include three major parts: compute, storage, and network. The IaaS service oriented NBI leaves a lot of detailed work for the upper layer applications (e.g. orchestrator).

The proposed project is to provide a more abstract VIM NBI alternative by extending the general cloud platform to to simplify the orchestrator and VNF manager, and make it easy for resource access, connection generation, flow identification, policy operation, etc. This higher level abstraction gives the upper layer applications another option in addition to the combination of openstack existing interfaces and extentions developed by other OPNFV projects.

The service oriented NBI extension encapsulate higher order operations appropriately in the NFV problem domain. It will build upon existing projects, like promise, copper, VNFFG, and so on, and their APIs to implement the NBI and find gaps when the NBI cannot be implemented by existing projects.

To achieve the NBI consistency, we can use the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and define system functionality using platform-independent models. Interfaces can be generated automatically with well defined models.

Describe the problem being solved by project

This project is to provide a more abstract VIM NBI alternative to better fitting the upper layer applications. With a set of higher level information models and interfaces, we can address most use-cases in a systematical way. The proposed project is intended to (tentatively scheduled):

• document typical NFV use-cases for high-level functional abstraction, and find gaps between OpenStack API and applicaitons;
• abstract the service oriented VIM NB models and interfaces;
• work together with other entities to achieve collaboration and synergy;
• provide an open source implementation for the NBI extension.
• and coordinate integrated testing and release testing results.

Specify any interface/API specification proposed

Vi-Vnfm, Or-Vi

Identify similar projects is underway or being proposed in OPNFV or upstream project

• The "Promise" project in OPNFV
• The "Copper" project in OPNFV
• The "VNFFG" project in OPNFV
• The "Doctor" project in OPNFV
• The "Nova" project in OpenStack
• The "Neutron" project in OpenStack
• the use cases and messages on this interface specified in the individual projects
• the new abstraction layer will consider the ETSI NFV IFA specifications

Names and affiliations of the committers:

  Tianran Zhou (zhoutianran@huawei.com)
  Yinben Xia (xiayinben@huawei.com)
  Wei Cao (wayne.caowei@huawei.com)
  Lei Zhu (lei.zhu@huawei.com)
  Zhipeng Huang (huangzhipeng@huawei.com)
  Linghui Zeng (linghui.zeng@huawei.com)
  Qiao Fu (fuqiao@chinamobile.com)
  Susan Hares (shares@ndzh.com)
  Zhiying Wang (wang.zhiying1@zte.com.cn)
  Gerald Kunzmann (kunzmann@docomolab-euro.com) 
  Peter Lee (plee@clearpathnet.com)
  David Lenrow (david.lenrow@hp.com)
  Frank Zdarsky (fzdarsky@redhat.com)

Any other contributors:

  Julien Zhang (zhang.jun3g@zte.com.cn)
  Rajeev Seth (rseth@sonusnet.com)
  Guofeng Shao (shaoguofeng@huawei.com)
  Parviz Yegani (pyegani@juniper.net)

• Described the project release package as OPNFV or open source upstream projects.

1. Document on typical NFV use-cases for high-level functional abstraction
2. Gap Analysis for existing OpenStack API and upper layer applicaitons
3. Blueprint sent to OpenStack, e.g. "Congress", "Neutron" and more.

• If project deliverables have multiple dependencies across other project categories, described linkage of the deliverables.

• When is the first release planned? Q3 2015
• Will this align with the current release cadence? Yes