1. UNIFY Service Provider DevOps: opportunities for NRENs
Catalin Meirosu1, Juhoon Kim2, Rebecca Steinert3, Per Krueger3
1 Ericsson Research
2 Deutsche Telekom
3 SICS Swedish ICT
Acknowledgements: Wolfgang John, Chunyan Fu (Ericsson); co-authors of draft-unify-nfvrg-devops-01

2. Overview The UNIFY project Service Provider DevOps Tool examples
Ideas for perfSONAR integration
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3. The FP7 UNIFY project in a nutshell
Increase velocity of telecom service introduction
Unified network-cloud programming abstraction: orchestration and generic processing
Novel observability and verification features
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4. UNIFY software-defined infrastructure
UNIFY architecture
UNIFY Universal Node
source: UNIFY D2.2
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5. Typical DevOps tools
Chef: configuration management and application deployment
central server, clients deployed on each resource (server or switch/router)
scripts (recipes written in Ruby, templates in markup language)
basic monitoring of resource parameter attributes
AppDynamics, NewRelic: monitoring and analytics
monitoring of both server and application performance
pretty graphs and visualizations
different level of details depending on role
some correlation performance between application- level transactions and infrastructure
build new plugins to collect new data (Ruby, Java, RESTful APIs)
scripts don’t scale well
hard to identify cross-script dependencies
difficult discovery of new resources
aimed at enterprise applications; carrier infrastructure not easy to integrate
configuration inconsistency for probes
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6. DevOps thinking for software-defined infrastructure
Roles
Service developer
Operator
VNF developer
DevOps principles
Deploy with repeatable, reliable processes
Identical, trusted processes; visibility
Develop and test against production-like systems
Isolation properties; frequent customizations
Monitor and validate operational quality
Established procedures for validation – for example Y.1564
Amplify feedback loops
Mainly cultural aspects
Original principles from: “DevOps, the IBM Approach” 2013
Interpretation from draft-unify-nfvrg-devops-01
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7. Some Service Provider requirements for DevOps
Five 9s service availability, needing:
increased network stability compared to a data center
latency and delay have increased impact on partitioning due to spatial distribution of resources
Observability
increased granularity, scalable to millions+ of continuous customer sessions
flexibility to adapt to resource programmability for a multitude of protocols
Validation and verification
integrate and extend existing procedures (Y.1564 for Ethernet Service Activation, for example) to new resource and service classes
Troubleshooting
plethora of individual tools exist solving very specific problems for one technology, integration extremely difficult. A set of common APIs is needed
adapted from draft-unify-nfvrg-devops-01
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8. Particularities of NREN environments compared to telecom carriers
Smaller and more agile teams
More geographically concentrated infrastructure
Higher degree of interaction with customers and integration of customer demands in offered services
Inherent support for users experimenting with the infrastructure (similarities VNF Developers)
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9. UNIFY SP-DevOps Observability
Deployment by MEASURE annotations to NF-FGs: define what and how to monitor; supporting triggers
Common interfaces for efficient data retrieval
Scalable software defined monitoring and verification
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10. Low-overhead SDN packet loss monitoring
UNIFY SP-DevOps API
Works with aggregate flow descriptors
No probes inserted in the network
Communication via OpenFlow
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11. Distributed link utilization monitor
Use two counters (first and second statistical moments for link utilization)
Transmit only the estimate to the controller, instead of high- speed data flow
thousands times data rate reduction compared to SNMP or plain OpenFlow
Estimates the risk of short-term congestion
UNIFY SP-DevOps API
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12. Options for perfSONAR integration
Assumption: deployment in GÉANT Testbed Service slice with switches having UNIFY measurement capabilities
Integration with the perfSONAR user interface
SDN congestion or packet loss metric
Automated generation of alerts
Integration based on perfSONAR protocol for message exchange between components
UNIFY monitoring tools as another category of interface statistics: translate UNIFY REST API onto RRD-MA
options aligned with GN3PLUS
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13. Conclusion
The UNIFY project proposes ways of adopting DevOps principles in operator networks and builds a dedicated set of tools along these principles
Tools developed in UNIFY project could provide additional performance information with low overhead
We have an ongoing survey on DevOps tools and practices that we intend to impact tool public releases in November timeframe – help us by answering 13 questions at
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14. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/ under grant agreement no the UNIFY project. The views expressed here are those of the author only. The European Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information in this document
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