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requirements_projects:nemo

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Project Name:

  • Proposed name for the project: VIM Northbound Model and Interface
  • Proposed name for the repository: nemo
  • Project Categories: (Requirements)

Project description:

According to the OPNFV architecture, Or-Vi and Vi-Vnfm are the northbound interface provided by the Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM), which face to the orchestrator and VNF manager separately.

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. Those APIs are not intuitive to be used as the northbound interface exposed to the upper layer applications(e.g. orchestrator). For example, while the VNF manager requests to create a VNF instance, it will consequently invoke several OpenStack APIs from Nova, Neutron or more. It would be intuitive for the NFV Scenario if only one simple API can express this request.

The proposed project is to provide a consistent, organized and intuitive northbound interface for VIM to better fitting the VNF manager and the orchestrator. For the existing NBI we are not going to redefine but to refine in a consistent way.

As we studied many NFV use-cases, most of them follows the same operation pattern:

  1. Create network elements;
  2. Generate links for the connectivity;
  3. Identify flows;
  4. Apply policies.

Or the combination of these operations.

Based on this kind of pattern, we got the following initial inputs, which need to be discussed and replenished.

With regard to the northbound interface requirements, four kinds of operations need to be considered.

  • Node operations: are to create, terminate, query, scale, migrate and operate a VNF or a VNFC instance. A VNF instance with several VNFCs can be abstracted as a logical node.
  • Link operations: are used for the connectivity among VNF/VNFC instances.
  • Flow operations: identity the flow to be operated with flow characters matching.
  • Policy operations: control the behavior of specific flow following the same pattern "with <condition>, to execute <action>".

The NBI should meet those requirements.

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach defines system functionality using platform-independent models. Interfaces can be generated automatically with well defined models. According to the previous interface requirements, the following model is necessary to be provided:

Based on the above models, all the operations to the models forms the NBI. One popular NBI fashion is the RESTful interface with implicit CRUD operations. Another notable NBI fashion is in the form of Domain Specific Language (DSL), which facilitate the intuitive expression on user intent and easily to be embedded into the system.

Scope:

Describe the problem being solved by project

This project is to provide a consistent, organized and intuitive northbound interface for VIM to better fitting the VNF manager and 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):

  • document typical NFV use-cases for high-level functional abstraction, and find gaps between OpenStack API and high level applicaitons;
  • abstract VIM NB models and interfaces, refine existing information models and develop new models;
  • work together with other entities to achieve collaboration and synergy;

The following figure shows the mapping to ETSI NFV architecture. As the first step, Or-Vnfm interface is beyond the scope of existing OPNFV. So the logical node operation will map to this architecture with secondary priority.

  • provide open source implementation for a shim layer. The northbound API encapsulates higher order operations appropriate in the NFV problem domain, and converts them into collections of calls to cloud platforms.
  • and coordinate integrated testing and release testing results.

Specify any interface/API specification proposed

Vi-Vnfm, Or-Vi

Dependencies:

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

  • The "Promise" project in OPNFV
  • The "Nova" project in OpenStack
  • The "Neutron" project in OpenStack
  • The "Congress" project in OpenStack

Committers and Contributors:

Name of and affiliation of the maintainer:

  Tianran Zhou (zhoutianran@huawei.com)

Names and affiliations of the committers:

  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)
  Guofeng Shao (shaoguofeng@huawei.com)
  Qiao Fu (fuqiao@chinamobile.com)
  Susan Hares (shares@ndzh.com)
  Zhiying Wang (wang.zhiying1@zte.com.cn)

Any other contributors:

  Julien Zhang (zhang.jun3g@zte.com.cn)
  Rajeev Seth (rseth@sonusnet.com)

Planned deliverables

  • Described the project release package as OPNFV or open source upstream projects.
  • If project deliverables have multiple dependencies across other project categories, described linkage of the deliverables.

Proposed Release Schedule:

  • When is the first release planned? Q2 2015
  • Will this align with the current release cadence? Yes
requirements_projects/nemo.1424960166.txt.gz · Last modified: 2015/02/26 14:16 by Tianran Zhou