Active and Available Inventory (AAI) is the OpenECOMP subsystem that provides real-time views of available Resources, Services, Products, Offers, and their relationships. AAI (sometimes referred to as A&AI) not only forms a registry of active, available, and assigned assets, it also maintains up-to-date views of the multidimensional relationships among these assets, including their relevance to different components of OpenECOMP. 

In addition to inventory and topology management, AAI provides the ability to do inventory administration.  Data in AAI is continually updated in real-time as changes are made within the cloud. Because AAI is metadata-driven, new inventory item types can be added dynamically and quickly with Service Design and Creation (SDC) catalog definitions, using the AAI model loader, thus eliminating the need for lengthy development cycles.

The AAI subsystem uses graph data technology to store relationships between inventory items. Graph traversals can then be used to identify chains of dependencies between items. Relationships captured by AAI include "top-to-bottom" relationships such as those defined in SDC when products are composed of services, and services are composed of resources. It also includes “side-to-side” relationships such as end-to-end connectivity of virtualized functions to form service chains. AAI also keeps track of the span of control of each controller, and is queried by MSO and placement functions to identify which controller to invoke to perform a given operation.

 AAI data views can be used by homing logic during real-time service delivery, root cause analysis of problems, impact analysis, and many other functions. 

Figure 1 provides a functional view of AAI.

Figure 1. Active and Available Inventory (AAI) functional diagram

Inventory and topology management 

AAI federates inventory using a central registry to create a global view of inventory and network topology. AAI receives updates from various inventory masters distributed throughout the OpenECOMP infrastructure, and persists just enough to maintain the global view. As transactions occur, AAI persists asset attributes and relationships into the federated view based on configurable metadata definitions for each activity that determine what is relevant to the AAI inventory. AAI provides standard APIs to enable queries from various clients regarding inventory and topology. Queries can be supported for a specific asset or a collection of assets. The AAI global view of relationships is necessary for forming aggregate views of detailed inventory across the distributed master data sources. 

Administration 

AAI also performs a number of administrative functions. Metadata models for the various assets are stored, updated, applied and versioned dynamically as needed without requiring a system shutdown for maintenance.