Presentació a càrrec de Maria Isabel Gandia, cap de Comunicacions del CSUC, duta a terme el 3 de març a Zagreb dins la 19a edició del "Service and Technology Forum", que ha tingut per objectiu actualitzar l'estat de les tasques realitzades pels diversos focus groups dins del grup "Evolució i desenvolupament de serveis de xarxa" (tasca 2) del paquet de treball de "Tecnologies i serveis de desenvolupament de xarxa" (WP6) del projecte GN4-3 sobre orquestració, automatització i virtualització. En concret, la presentació mostra la feina feta per trobar una terminologia comuna, una arquitectura de referència per a l'orquestració i automatització de serveis, un wiki on compartir la informació i uns casos d'ús, com ara la gestió de xarxes de campus. També explica els aspectes més complexos per trobar consens en l'automatització i orquestració de serveis de les xarxes acadèmiques i de recerca europees (NREN) i també a nivell multi-domini, ja que es troben en nivells de maduresa molt diversos.

1. Orchestration, Automation and
Virtualisation (OAV) in GÉANT
www.geant.org
Maria Isabel Gandia, CSUC/RedIRIS
WP6-T2 / Consensus Building
19th STF
Zagreb, 3 March 2020

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AutomatedManual

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AutomatedManual

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AutomatedManual

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https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/1221782244525858819

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100%
Orchestation
everywhere
I wish I could
automate, but I’m too
busy operating a
network
I have islands
of automation
Campus Network
Management services are
automated. The core is
not and will never be.
I have my own
Automation &
Orchestration platform
Let’s automate
multidomain
provisioning!
I might automate
for a
Government
Project next year
I’m starting to
automate some
manual tasks to do the
same
I’m not planning
to implement any
inter-domain
orchestration
My NOC is not
confident on
softwares
I’m trying to
find devOps
engineers

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It’s a mindset Change
• At all levels!
• If the management does not believe in automation
• If the company does not see the benefits
• If the network engineers don’t learn how to automate
IT
WON’T
WORK
Oh, no, NOC
engineers
Oh, no,
Gartner again.
Automation is
going to make
my life easier
Automation is
going to make
my life easier

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• The following people are contributing to our consensus
building work (typically at 10-20% FTE effort)
• 16 people from 12 organisations at 10 NRENs
Our WP6 T2 consensus building team
Jasone Astorga (RedIRIS / UPV/EHU) Roman Lapacz (PSNC)
Ramesh Baskaran (Jisc) Daniel Lete (HEAnet)
Yuri Demchenko (SURFnet / UvA) Susanne Naegele-Jackson (DFN / FAU)
Martin Dunmore (Jisc) Jerry Sobieski (NORDUnet)
Sonja Filiposka (MARNET / USC) Kostas Stamos (GRNET / CTI)
Eduardo Jacob (RedIRIS / UPV/EHU) Maria Isabel Gandia (RedIRIS/CSUC)
Iacovos Ioannou (CyNet) Tim Chown (Jisc, WPL)
Hamzeh Khalili (RedIRIS/i2CAT) Ivana Golub (PSNC, WPL)

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OAV
• OAV: Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation.
• Orchestration and Automation are needed to make a smarter use of
resources:
• Enable faster service delivery / decrease delivery time
• Reduce the number of human errors
• Decrease the amount of manual work
• Lower the costs of service delivery
• Ensure configuration consistency
• Provide better reporting
• Increase efficiency
• Increase configuration uniformity and consistency
• Improve compliance with configuration policies
• Our aim is to promote wider adoption of general OAV principles within the
NREN community.

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OAV in the GÉANT Project
• Work on OAV has spanned several generations of the
GÉANT project:
• e-infrastructure integration
• Service Provider Architecture (SPA)
• GÉANT Testbeds Service (GTS)
• Network Management as a Service (NMaaS)
• perfSONAR
• PMP
• …

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• OAV Survey presented last year at STF17, in Dublin, and D6.2
Deliverable (published in Sep 19):
https://www.geant.org/Projects/GEANT_Project_GN4-3/GN43_deliverables/D6-2_Automation-and-
Orchestration-of-Services-in-the-GEANT-Community.pdf
• Several discussions and workshops around the topic:
• GN4-3 Future Service Strategy Workshop, May 19
• BoF session at TNC, June 19
• Network Management and Monitoring Workshop (NEMMO), Oct 19
• Strong need for collaboration and exchange of knowledge and
expertise:
• Knowledge as a gap.
• We speak different languages.
• A generally accepted architecture needed.
• NRENs are willing to share experiences and learn from others.
OAV in the GÉANT Community

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Consensus Building
• Several Focus Groups (FG) were established around OAV
• Designed to be (initially) short-lived with specific outputs
• Currently working on:
• Terminology
• Architecture
• CNaaS (use case)
• OAV public wiki
• More Focus Groups can be established if needed

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Focus Group: Terminology
• Need for an agreement on common terminology.
• The idea is to have a common ground of understanding.

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Focus Group: Terminology
• The FG identified a list of relevant OAV
terms and acronyms.
• There aren’t any documents in the
literature that include all this information.
• For each term, a short definition with a
reference link (source) was included.
• We tried to use standard-based
definitions whenever we could find them
and listed internal definitions (based on
the consensus of all team members) in
cases where no standard definitions were
found.
• A survey was conducted for final
adjustments.
https://wiki.geant.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=133765930

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Focus Group: Terminology – Terms and Glossary
https://wiki.geant.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=133765930

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Focus Group: Architecture - Four stages of the network
automation and orchestration process*
NETWORK
CONFIGURATION AND
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
ORCHESTRATION POLICY-BASED
AUTOMATION
INTENT-BASED
NETWORKING SYSTEMS
* Source: Gartner’s Market Guide
Prepare the network automation tools strategy by supporting virtual network
infrastructures and programmatic, open-standard APIs.

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Focus Group: Architecture
• The FG is studying a variety of OAV architectures and frameworks
to look at common approaches that could be considered as part of
a GÉANT strategy.
• Goal: we are trying to describe a blueprint that is based on the
most common architecture principles and would also allow us to
see a common strategy forward that would be flexible enough to
combine existing solutions with new ones
NOT “one architecture to rule them all”!

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Focus Group: Architecture
• The list of architectures under analysis includes:
• Standardisation bodies/organisations/associations based architectures:
• ETSI (ZSM, OSM(MANO)/NFV, GANA)
• MEF (LSO)
• TMFORUM (ODA, ODF)
• Commercial products:
• Anuta
• Ciena
• Cisco
• Project-based architectures:
• GVM
• SENSE
• TALENT
• First round analysis + deep dive analysis.

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Standard 2Standard 1Standard 1

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ETSI ZSM
MEF LSO
OGF GNA
ONAP
ETSI OSM (MANO)
ONF
TALENT
OGF SENSE
TMF ODA
TMF ODF
5G PPP
ETSI GANA
ETSI NFV
AN NSO
Oracle SNO
Ciena MDSO
AT&T ECOMP
“The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

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Focus Group: Architecture – Aspects Covered by Each Architecture

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Focus Group: Architecture – Dear Santa
• Open API
• Scalability (scale in/out and up/down)
• Virtualisation of resources: Infrastructure-
independence
• Must be able to use commercial or free
VNFs or predefined Network Services as
virtual objects
• Catalog/repository for VNFs and NSs.
• Discrete atomic network service objects
that can be built into customized complex
service compositions
• Should be able to handle hierarchies of
orchestrators, multi-domain orchestration
• Must be technology agnostic
• Documentation
• Community support
• Proven interoperability
• Support physical and virtual networks
• Resources and services should be
represented in standardized data modeling
language (e.g. YANG/TOSCA)
• Extensibility
• Complexity-hiding
• Compatibility with the standard industry
adopted architectures and frameworks such
as promoted by TMF (e.g. OSS/BSS), ETSI,
IETF, OASIS
• Compatibility and integration with cloud-
based resources virtualisation, management
and infrastructure deployment
• Possibility to use popular deployment
automation tools such as Ansible, Chef,
Puppet, others
• Possibility of integration with the popular
DevOps or NetDevOps tools and platforms

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Focus Group: Architecture - Trying to put them all into the same
schema

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Focus Group: Architecture
Lego Blocks
www.geant.org

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Focus Group: Architecture - The Vegas Rule

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Focus Group: Architecture – Current Work: The Open Digital
Architecture
https://inform.tmforum.org/insights/2020/02/action-week-2020-building-the-autonomous-network-with-lego-blocks/

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Focus Group: Architecture – Current Work: The ODA
Framework
• Collaborative approach to operationalising and
monetising infrastructure platforms and platform
business models.
• Focused on creating an industry-wide standard, based
on the TM Forum Open APIs and other assets such as
the Frameworx Information Framework.
More on ODA: https://www.tmforum.org/oda/
More on Frameworx: https://www.tmforum.org/frameworx-homepage/

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• Limited set of architecture principles as general rules and
guidelines:
• Approach aligned to the TOGAF* standards:
• Name, statement, rationale, implications
• Principles should be understandable, robust, complete, consistent
and stable.
• Principles must align with the Organisation Goals, not just IT goals.
• Principles need to ensure interoperability between diverse
implementations at both protocol and semantic / model levels.
Focus Group: Architecture – Current Work: The ODA Framework
* TOGAF= The Open Group Architecture Framework

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Focus Group: Architecture – TM Forum Open Digital
Architecture
https://inform.tmforum.org/insights/2018/08/forum-focus-whats-new-oda/

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Focus Group: Architecture – Trying to map an architecture
WebUI,
Helpdesk
REST APIs,
plugins
Contract,
CRM
Procurement
of network
components,
SLA
Hardware control,
NMS Documentation
Netconf APIs
,
YAML models,
IPAM
ZTP,
Inventory,
Ansible

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Focus Group: Architecture – Examples – [Your NREN here]

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Focus Group: CNaaS (Campus Network Management as a Service)
 NRENs offering CNaaS use OAV techniques
 As in OAV, there are many different approaches and targets
 Evidence of high level of NREN interest
 Clear need to share information
Discussion
channels
cnass-discuss@lists.geant.org
mailing list
#cnaas
slack channel
Use cases sharing
Infoshares
coming soon
Volunteers?
Community Portal:
https://wiki.geant.org/display/
OAV/OAV+Community+Portal
Community meetings:
• SIG-NOC meetings
• NEMMO

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Focus Group: CNaaS (Campus Network Management as a Service)
No Service Definition (SD) Document “one fits all”.
References when writing your own Service Definition, contract or SLA
Document Checklist/Template
in word format**
Deliverable D6.4 Campus
Network Management*
* https://www.geant.org/Projects/GEANT_Project_GN4-3/GN43_deliverables/D6.4_Campus_Network_Management.pdf
** https://wiki.geant.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=123792049

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Focus Group: OAV wiki - Knowledge sharing and global exchange
•
https://wiki.geant.org/display/OAV/

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Focus Group OAV Wiki: Terminology – Terms and Glossary
https://wiki.geant.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=133765930

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Focus Group OAV Wiki: Architecture

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Focus Group: OAV public wiki – The OAV Community Portal
• Each NREN can present their OAV work there or provide links.
• NRENs willing to share information or find out more about OAV
can reach the team at gn4-3-wp6-oav@lists.geant.org
https://wiki.geant.org/display/OAV/OAV+COMMUNITY+PORTAL

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Next steps
• Continue the work on the FGs (Architecture) or suspend the work to be
resumed later if needed (Terminology, CNaaS, wiki).
• Create new FGs if needed (other use cases, training…)
• Continuously disseminate the results of the focus groups and knowledge
exchange (Wiki, Infoshares, mailing lists, etc).
• Provide a tools repository where NRENs can share their orchestration and
automation scripts, tools, templates, etc.
• Create Trainings about OAV both for Management (Architecture, Strategy…)
and Operations Teams (Ansible, devOps…)
• Towards multi-domain OAV:
• NRENs make their own decisions on the national architecture but comply to standards
for international compatibility.
• Use APIs that are compliant with relevant standards and specifications at a European
and global scale.

41. Thank you
www.geant.org
Any questions?
Or email us:
gn4-3-wp6-oav@lists.geant.org
© GÉANT Association on behalf of the GN4 Phase 3 project (GN4-3).
The research leading to these results has received funding from
the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under Grant Agreement No. 856726 (GN4-3).