Network Function Change Management Project Proposal (5/11/17)

Project Name:

• Proposed name for the project: Network Function Change Management
• Proposed name for the repository: NFCM

Project description:

• Network Functions (NFs) like any software have to be updated periodically (to support new features, fix bugs, security holes, etc). However, complex dependencies, upgrade mechanisms, SLAs etc require that the upgrades or changes are managed carefully. For example, NFs may by upgraded in-place or through a scale out and replace mechanism. The change may require draining, redirection, or load-balancing of traffic. It may also involve multiple NFs whose changes need to be coordinated for service continuity. It will also require capabilities like A/B testing, pre- and post- change testing, scheduling, etc. This project, Network Function Change management, provides the capability to design, schedule and manage configuration changes and software upgrades of network functions managed by ONAP. This project exposes the existing capabilities of ONAP components (like that of the service orchestrator and the controller) to users to help them stitch workflows that use these capabilities for managing NF changes or upgrades.

Scope:

Since Change Management is an E2E platform function the focus for R1 will be to define the flows and ensure that ONAP components provide the Interfaces and data needed. 

• This project provides users with the ability to design workflows based on a suite of existing capabilities exposed by other ONAP components. For example, a user can make calls to a controller to execute actions, to A&AI to get inventory status, and existing orchestration flows, and combine these calls to achieve a higher level orchestration function. SDC will be used for designing the workflows.
• This project provides a capability to deploy (and undeploy) and upgrade the designed workflows to an execution environment (e.g., the service orchestrator). This assumes that the execution environment provides APIs to perform these functions.
• This project provides runtime management (start, pause, resume, stop, rollback) and monitoring of the workflows.  This project provides a portal for a user to come in and manually control these workflows or monitor them or track the history of workflows that have been executed. Again we assume that the execution environment provides APIs to perform these functions. We also assume that other ONAP components (e.g., Policy) can trigger one of these workflows as part of a control loop action.
• This project provides capabilities for scheduling workflows. The schedule could range across a subset of the instances of an NF, across instances of multiple NFs or combinations therein. For complex scheduling use cases we foresee the use of SNIRO Optimization Framework to be used as a home for specific scheduling optimization micro-services.
• This project provides capabilities for selecting the type and instances of the NFs that need to be associated with the workflows (as well as for scheduling).
• This project will document the best practices for End-to-End workflow design.

Beijing Release: We have reduced the functionality scope for Change Management in Beijing to execute a pre-defined workflow to carry out in-place software upgrade.

Other functionalities would be considered in subsequent ONAP releases.

Architecture Alignment:

• How does this project fit into the rest of the ONAP Architecture?
• The figures below show sample E2E flows that will be executed as part of NF Change. 
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What other ONAP projects does this project depend on?

• SDC
• Portal
• Service Orchestrator
• Controllers
• A&AI
• Policy
• DCAE
• Optimization Framework(SNIRO)

• How does this align with external standards/specifications?
• It is not based on any external standards/specs
• Are there dependencies with other open source projects?
• There are no dependencies with other open source projects.

Resources:

• Primary Contact Person: Emmanouil Mavrogiorgis (emaurog@research.att.com)
• Ajay Mahimkar(AT&T)
• Giritharan Rana (AT&T)
• Jennifer Yates(AT&T)
• Zihui Ge (AT&T)
  
  

Other Information:

• link to seed code (if applicable)
• In order to better align with target ONAP architecture all Change Management activities will be designed and executed through the appropriate components (SDC will be used to design and store workflows, SO will be used to execute them).
• Vendor Neutral
• No code will be delivered at least for Release 1

Use the above information to create a key project facts section on your project page

Key Project Facts

Project Name:

• JIRA project name:Network Function Change Management
• JIRA project prefix:NFCM

Repo name:NFCM
Lifecycle State: Incubation
Primary Contact:TBD

Project Lead:TBD
mailing list tag: NFCM 
Committers:

Emmanouil Mavrogiorgis ( emaurog@research.att.com )

Giritharan Rana ( giri@research.att.com )

*Link to TSC approval: