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VIM Northbound Model and Interface
nemo
(Requirements)
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:
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.
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.
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):
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.
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)