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1 Terminology

This section describes the terminology used in the system.

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At Run Time, the following Control Loop Life Cycle mangement management capabilities are supported:

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Following the ONAP Reference Architecture, the architecture has a Design Time part and a Runtime part.

The Design Time part of the archtiecture architecture allows a user to specify metadata for participants. It also allows users to compose control loops. The Design Time Catalogue contains the metadata primitives and control loop definition primitives for composition of control loops. As shown in the figure above, the Design Time component provides a system where Control Loops can be designed and defined in metadata. This means that a Control Loop can have any arbitrary structure and the Control Loop developers can use whatever analytic, policy, or control participants they like to implement their Control Loop. At composition time, the user parameterises the Control Loop and stores it in the design time catalogue. This catalogue contains the primitive metadata for any participants that can be used to compose a Control Loop. A Control Loop SDK is used to compose a Control Loop by aggregating the metadata for the participants chosen to be used in a Control Loop and by constructing the references between the participants. The architecture of the Control Loop Design Time part will be elaborated in future releases.

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In the figure above, five participants are shown. A Configuration Perisistence Persistence Participant manages Control Loop Elements that interact with the ONAP Configuration Persistence Service to store common data. The DCAE Participant runs Control Loop Elements that manage DCAE microservices. The Kubernetes Participant hosts the Control Loop Elements that are managing the life cycle of microservices in control loops that are in a Kubernetes ecosystem. The Policy Participant handles the Control Loop Elements that interact with the Policy Framework to manage policies for control loops. A Controller Participant such as the CDS Participant runs Control Loop Elements that load metadata and configure controllers so that they can partake in control loops. Any third party Existing System Participant can be developed to run Control Loop Elements that interact with any existing system (such as an operator's analytic, machine learning, or artificial intelligence system) so that those systems can partake in control loops.

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This approach makes it easy to scale Control Loop life cycle management. As Control Loop Instance counts increase, more than one CLAMP runtime can be deployed and REST/supervision operations on Control Loop Instances can run in parallel. The number of participants can scale because an asynchronous broadcast mechanism is used for runtime-participant communication and there is no direct connection or communication channel between participants and CLAMP runtime servers. Participant state, Control Loop Instance state, and Control Loop Element state is held in the database, so any CLAMP runtime server can handle operations for any participant. Because many participants of a particular type can be deployed and participant instances can load balance control loop element instances for different Control Loop Instances of many types across themselves using a mechanism such as a Kubernetes cluster.

4.3 Sandboxing and API Gateway Support

4.4 Security and Multi Tenancy

5 APIs and Protocols

The APIs and Protocols used by CLAMP for Control Loops At runtime, interaction between ONAP platform services and application microservices are relatively unconstrained, so interactions between Control Loop Elements for a given Control Loop Instance remain relatively unconstrained. A proposal to support access-controlled access to and between ONAP services will improve this. This can be complemented by intercepting and controlling services accesses between Control Loop Elements for Control Loop Instances for some/all Control Loop types.

API gateways such as Kong have emerged as a useful technology for exposing and controlling service endpoint access for applications and services. When a Control Loop Type is onboarded, or when Control Loop Instances are created in the Participants, CLAMP can configure service endpoints between Control Loop Elements to redirect through an API Gateway.

Authentication and access-control rules can then be dynamically configured at the API gateway to support constrained access between Control Loop Elements and Control Loop Instances.

The diagram below shows the approach for configuring API Gateway access at Control Loop Instance and Control Loop Element level.

At design time, the Control Loop type definition specifies the type of API gateway configuration that should be supported at Control Loop and Control Loop Element levels.

At runtime, the CLAMP can configure the API gateway to enable (or deny) interactions between Control Loop Instances and individually for each Control Loop Element. All service-level interactions in/out of a Control Loop Element, except that to/from the API Gateway, can be blocked by networking policies, thus sandboxing a Control Loop Element and an entire Control Loop Instance if desired. Therefore, a Control Loop Element will only have access to the APIs that are configured and enabled for the Control Loop Element/Instance in the API gateway.

For some Control Loop Element Types the Participant can assist with service endpoint reconfiguration, service request/response redirection to/from the API Gateway, or annotation of requests/responses.

Once the Control Loop instance is instantiated on participants, the participants configure the API gateway with the Control Loop Instance level configuration and with the specific configuration for their Control Loop Element.

Monitoring and logging of the use of the API gateway may also be provided. Information and statistics on API gateway use can be read from the API gateway and passed back in monitoring messages to the CLAMP runtime.

Additional isolation and execution-environment sandboxing can be supported depending on the Control Loop Element Type. For example: ONAP policies for given Control Loop Instances/Types can be executed in a dedicated PDP engine instances; DCAE or K8S-hosted services can executed in isolated namespaces or in dedicated workers/clusters; etc..

5 APIs and Protocols

The APIs and Protocols used by CLAMP for Control Loops are described on the pages below:

1. System Level Dialogues
2. Defining Control Loops in TOSCA for CLAMP
3. REST APIs for CLAMP Control LoopsAutomation Composition
4. The CLAMP Control Loop Automation Composition Participant Protocol

6 Design and Implementation

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