Presentation given at Isocore's MPLS/SDN 2014 conference in Washington DC, on devtest orchestration to support the SDN/NFV transition and DevOps transformation at carriers and mobile operators.

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DevTest Orchestration for SDN & NFV
Alex Henthorn-Iwane -- QualiSystems -- alex.h@qualisystems.com
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SDN DevTest Implications
Network as Utility
App Lifecycle is Agile
• Waterfall timeframes
• Agile timeframes
• Long certification cycles
• Implies automation
• Manual, little automation OTT NFV SDN OSS/BSS
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Dev/Test Cycle
VS

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NFV Impact on DevTest
• NFV creates opportunity to easily create custom
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service chains
• Problem:
• Possibly endless service chains
• Almost infinite certification matrix
• Challenges:
• How to qualify all these service chains
• How to synchronize with whole network certification
• Without automation, this is impossible

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SDN/NFV: Culture Change to DevOps
From AT&T’s Domain 2.0 initiative white paper:
“There remains much to do before this vision [Domain 2.0]
can be implemented, including pivots from networking
craft to software engineering, and from carrier operations
models to cloud “DevOps” models. We also see an
important pivot to embrace agile development in
preference to existing waterfall models.”
DevOps Practice Requires Automation
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SDN/NFV DevOps Orchestration &
Automation
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Accept that Infrastructure Will Be Diverse
Orchestration
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Difference between Production and
DevOps Orchestration
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Use Case
Governance
Infrastructure
Management
Southbound
Integration
DevTest Orchestration Productivity Production Orchestration $$
Paying End-Continuous Integration Hours to Days Users Days to Months
Test Automation
Dynamic
Sandbox
Unified Reservation/Scheduling N x OSS N x BSS
End-to-End Environment
Orchestration Cloud Orchestration
Network Abstraction
Vendor-driven, “2 weeks”
Reusable Object Layer
“DIY”, “2 hours”
Production Services SLAs
Goal

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Enable Automation Across the Whole Organization
• Network teams have few programmers,
majority are non-programmers
• App developers aren’t network
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engineers
• Avoid programmer bottleneck
• Need to systematize knowledge
• Create non-programmer productivity:
o Scales the iniative,
• Fast starts are great, but sustainability
is key

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Some Practical Things We’ve Learned
Reusable object layer for
automation and
infrastructure components
Both OOTB libraries and tools
for open integration
Visual tools for orchestration
and automation authoring
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A Vendor-Specific Example of DevOps Self-Service
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Select
environment
Verify
availability
Reserve
Setup
Conduct
activities
Teardown
Collaborate
https://devnetsandb
ox.cisco.com/Acco
unt/Login?ReturnUr
l=%2f

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SDN Lab Orchestration
Hosted by Ericsson
ODL Lab hosted by Ericsson San Jose is building an
orchestration layer for sandbox use cases
Key requirements were:
• Allows members to build their own sandbox
• Reusable automation layer
What does a SDN orchestration and validation process
look like?
• http://www.qualisystems.com/resources/videos/cloudsh
ell-sdn-video-qos-orchestration-and-validation
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Okinawa Open Lab—DevOps Sandboxes
• Founded by NTT Com, NEC, Okinawa government agency, with
30+ members so far—NEMs, service providers, academia, etc.
• Offers cloud-based DevOps sandboxes for collaborative
development of SDN NFV use cases over open source
technologies (eg OpenStack)
• Even though open-source oriented, chose a commercial
orchestration platform that specialized in DevOps use cases
• They can orchestrate sandboxes that include open orchestrators,
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controllers, etc.
• Required true, dynamic sandboxing that went beyond static
catalog offerings
• www.okinawaopenlab.org

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Network DevOps Self-Service to People Processes
TO
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Goal: Continuous Network Certification
Apply Continuous Integration Practice to SDN/App NFV Change Cycles
Code Commit Automated Build Automated Unit Test
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Automated Sanity
Test
Automated Scaled Full
Regression Test
Automated Test
Results Collection
Automated BI Report
Generation
Automated Build, Deploy, Test
Auto-scaled regression tests
Applied to service network changes

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Low Hanging Fruit:
Evolve the Network Test Lab Operation
Highly Manual, Inefficient,
Low-Utilization Infrastructure
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Equipment Reservation
System
Testbed Design
System
Connectivity Mgmt
System
Provisioning
System
Software-Defined,
Self-Service
TO: Infrastructure Clouds

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SDN and NFV require a change in devtest operational
practice to become agile
A combination of:
• DevOps approach
• Self-service orchestration and automation enablers
• Automation best practices
Can support a continuous development process for
networks, SDN apps and NFV service chains
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Conclusions

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