The key output of SDC is a set of models containing descriptions of asset capabilities and instructions to manage them. These models are stored in the SDC Master Reference Catalog for the entire enterprise to use.

There are four major components of SDC:

• The Catalog

•  is the repository for assets at the Resource

• and Service

• levels. Assets are added to the Catalog using the Design Studio.

• The Design Studio

•  is used to create, modify, and add Resource

• and Service

• definitions in the Catalog.

• The Certification Studio, available in a future release, is used to test new assets at all levels. It will be used for sandbox experimentation, and will include support for automated testing.

• The Distribution Studio

•  is used to deploy certified assets. From the Distribution studio, new

• Service assets, including their underlying Resources and Services, are deployed into lab environments for testing purposes, and into production after certification is complete. In a future release, there will be a way to export Product information to external Business Support Systems for customer ordering and billing.

The definitions of assets include Information Artifacts and Deployment Artifacts. Information Artifacts are provided by the vendor of an asset such as a VNF; they describe characteristics of the asset. Some of these artifacts are supporting documents intended for human readers only, whereas others contain data that will be imported into the ONAP environment when the asset is onboarded.

Once assets are on-boarded, the information provided by the vendor is translated into SDC internal resource models.  The service provider will use SDC to further enrich the resource model to meet the provider’s environment, and additionally compose resources into service

models.  The model includes not only the description of the asset but also references to ONAP functions needed for lifecycle management of the asset.  The tested models will then be distributed to the ONAP execution environment as Deployment Artifacts.

The Deployment Artifacts include the asset definition (a Resource or Service

) with instructions to ONAP for creation and management of an instance of the asset in the network. Currently, SDC imports and retains information from Heat Templates for cloud infrastructure creation, YANG XML files for state data manipulated by the Network Configuration Protocol, TOSCA files for specifying cloud infrastructure, and certain vendor provided scripts. In the future, SDC may import BPMN/BPEL files for specifying business processes and their interconnections in a service-oriented architecture.