VIM Northbound Model and Interface
vim_nbi
(Requirements)
While OpenStack is a competitive candidate for VIM, existing interfaces provided by OpenStack include three major parts: compute, storage, and network. However, OpenStack as a general cloud platform is not customized for NFV scenario, leaving a lot of detailed work for the NFV orchestrator.
The proposed project is to provide a consistent and intuitive northbound interface for VIM to better fitting the orchestrator, and make it easy for resource access, connection generation, flow identification, policy operation, etc. This higher level interface gives the upper layer application (e.g. orchestrator) another option in addition to openstack native interfaces.
There will be a shim layer to encapsulate higher order operations appropriately in the NFV problem domain, and convert them into collections of calls to cloud platforms. This project will use existing projects, like promise, copper, VNFFG, and so on, 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 consistent and intuitive northbound interface for VIM to better fitting the orchestrator. With a set of information models and interfaces, we can address most use-cases in a systematical way. The proposed project is intended to (tentatively scheduled):
Specify any interface/API specification proposed
Vi-Vnfm, Or-Vi
Identify similar projects is underway or being proposed in OPNFV or upstream project
Names and affiliations of the committers:
Tianran Zhou (zhoutianran@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)
Any other contributors:
Julien Zhang (zhang.jun3g@zte.com.cn) Rajeev Seth (rseth@sonusnet.com) Guofeng Shao (shaoguofeng@huawei.com) Yinben Xia (xiayinben@huawei.com) Wei Cao (wayne.caowei@huawei.com)