TM Forum Community

The TM Forum OLM (onboarding and lifecycle management) team under the ZOOM project has been working on Virtual Function (VF) onboarding automation issue for quite some time.  For the new year, we would like to kick off a few discussion threads to make you aware of the work that we have been doing and to get your engagement and inputs as well.

While many standards and open source projects have contributed to the VF onboarding/Lifecycle Management space, the focus of those efforts have been primarily on how to onboard the functional aspects of the VF onto infrastructure environment (compute, storage, network).

Equally important is the operational information of the VF that needs to be provided by vendors to onboard/integrate VFs onto SP operational environment, such as for license/asset management, managing and calculating SLA, how to collect fault management and performance management data of the VF, etc.  These are the type of information that the TM Forum has been focusing on and highlighted in the following picture; we call them non-functional metadata:

• Package ID  (for catalog, asset, and usage right management)
• VF Package Type  (determine its <g class="gr_ gr_208 gr-alert gr_spell gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim ContextualSpelling ins-del multiReplace" id="208" data-gr-id="208">orchestratability</g> and level of infrastructure dependencies)
• VF Functional Category (e.g., IMS, firewall, this will help determine associated operations support)
• License information (to support asset management,  vendor/SP revenue scheme, customer billing)
• SLAs (of several different types, e.g., package support for customers, supplier support for updates, etc.)
• Metrics information (mandatory and optional metrics supported by the package)
• Testing information  (test cases, test script, test results including security test results and checksums)

We will follow up with more posts on each of the category in coming weeks.  You can read about this general concept in the IG1141 document (currently available to the TM Forum members only).

We are interested in your view/feedback and if you think of any additional metadata categories that might need to be defined to help facilitate the onboarding automation and lifecycle management for SP operations.

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Jenny S Huang
AT&T Services Inc., Standards and Industry Alliances
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​Jenny,
very interesting but how do you think such initiative will interact / coordinate with others like ONAP and ETSI OSM ?

It would be nice to keep some kind of interoperability, otherwise risk is the proliferation of standards...

Thanks and best regards

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Angelo Baccarani
Product Manager - NFV Service Assurance
Empirix - Italy
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Hi Angelo,

At this stage,  the OLM team has a closer tie to the ONAP project than OSM, simply because several contributing member companies are also ONAP members.   

I was at the ONAP Beijing developer forum a few weeks ago,  they are indeed looking for inputs from the TM Forum in this area. The OLM work is not fully mature yet for contribution hence we are reaching out to the broader TM Forum community.

Btw, the current official activity between TM Forum and ONAP is around the introduction of  TM Forum APIs, we made the presentation to ONAP SDO committee here TMF-ONAP Dec.12 SDO V4.pptx and the API work is being done in ONAP ExtAPI project.   We also have weekly TM Forum ONAP Interest Group calls to coordinate the activities. The call is on every Tuesday and you can see the calendar here: https://projects.tmforum.org/wiki/display/ZOOM/Calendar

Regards,

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Jenny S Huang
AT&T Services Inc., Standards and Industry Alliances
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-05-2018 02:25
From: Angelo Baccarani
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

​Jenny,
very interesting but how do you think such initiative will interact / coordinate with others like ONAP and ETSI OSM ?

It would be nice to keep some kind of interoperability, otherwise risk is the proliferation of standards...

Thanks and best regards

------------------------------
Angelo Baccarani
Product Manager - NFV Service Assurance
Empirix - Italy
------------------------------

​HI Angelo,
 Couple of additional points reinforcing the observation you make about need for  cross industry group cooperation and effort:

1. Both ONAP and OSM use the term onboarding but within their missions they  focus primarily on the instantiation of software images on a variety of virtualazation infrastructure VM/ containers. Our intial work on procurement  and onboarding IG1123 NFV Readiness: Packaging Virtualized Network Services for Procurement and Operations R14.5.1 showed the thte scope of metadata required for commercial and operational onboarding requires a wider perspective and an extended set of metadata.
   Our initial metadata assessment in TR269 Onboarding Automation and Package Metadata R17.0.1 needs to be validated hence this discussion thread.
2. As an example, Licensing spans commercial, operational and technical metadata and we ( facilitated by  Netcracker)  have worked jointly with ETSI NFV  and produced IG1143 - License Management Release 16.5 and IG1141A Onboarding Automation: Package ID, Software Assets and License Management Support R17.5.0 and which complements ETSI GR NFV-EVE 010 v3.1.1 "License Management report"

If in your studies you have identified specific areas where metadata for commercial, operational and technical onboarding is lacking, we would really like to hear about  them on this discussion thread. Also any best practice experiences.

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Dave Milham
TM Forum Chief Architect
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-05-2018 14:41
From: Jenny Huang
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

Hi Angelo,

At this stage,  the OLM team has a closer tie to the ONAP project than OSM, simply because several contributing member companies are also ONAP members.   

I was at the ONAP Beijing developer forum a few weeks ago,  they are indeed looking for inputs from the TM Forum in this area. The OLM work is not fully mature yet for contribution hence we are reaching out to the broader TM Forum community.

Btw, the current official activity between TM Forum and ONAP is around the introduction of  TM Forum APIs, we made the presentation to ONAP SDO committee here TMF-ONAP Dec.12 SDO V4.pptx and the API work is being done in ONAP ExtAPI project.   We also have weekly TM Forum ONAP Interest Group calls to coordinate the activities. The call is on every Tuesday and you can see the calendar here: https://projects.tmforum.org/wiki/display/ZOOM/Calendar

Regards,

------------------------------
Jenny S Huang
AT&T Services Inc., Standards and Industry Alliances
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: 01-05-2018 02:25
From: Angelo Baccarani
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

​Jenny,
very interesting but how do you think such initiative will interact / coordinate with others like ONAP and ETSI OSM ?

It would be nice to keep some kind of interoperability, otherwise risk is the proliferation of standards...

Thanks and best regards

------------------------------
Angelo Baccarani
Product Manager - NFV Service Assurance
Empirix - Italy

​I wonder if we need to include APIs and recipes which could be in the form of scripts. These could be standards based.

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Milind Bhagwat
BT Group plc
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------Original Message------

​I wonder if we need to include APIs and recipes which could be in the form of scripts. These could be standards based.

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Milind Bhagwat
BT Group plc
------------------------------

​

​Thanks Milind, this brings up another important point about the modeling aspects of the metadata.

The challenges that we are facing and the modeling/tool chain debates in the industry e.g. TOSCA, YANG, HEAT etc. IMHO, is that no two VFs, or even of the same 'VF type', will be designed the same way or have the same requirements in operations.

This means everything in concern has to be modeled (partial model does not compute!), this is far from practical. The ideal approach is to have an intent based model to allow business to select the options at run time to achieve deep optimization.

The cube of the package symbol actually has some significance, based on team member inputs it represents a 3-dimensional VF Modeling (a Metamodel)

• Business Semantic: describe both functional and nonfunctional aspects, such as licensing, testing, SLA etc. with rich metadata (this is the metadata that I kicked off this thread)
• Technical Details: describe the syntactical data format to be exchanged and protocols. (HEAT, NETCONF etc.)
• Behaviors: additional information that would modify the behaviors of its exposed function (policies, management APIs etc.)

 

We are leaning towards using TOSCA to properly represent all these information, the important thing is to figure out the content and their relationships.  Will be interested to hear more feedback on the direction that we are going and which organizations that we need to work with besides a few obvious ones.

------------------------------
Jenny S Huang
AT&T Services Inc., Standards and Industry Alliances
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 01-11-2018 05:05
From: Milind Bhagwat
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

​I wonder if we need to include APIs and recipes which could be in the form of scripts. These could be standards based.

------------------------------
Milind Bhagwat
BT Group plc
------------------------------

​These concerns are moving us towards needing to develop a more complete view of a models driven approach to manage the activities in the  full commercial and technical onboarding lifecycle where TOSCA is used as data structure to exchange information between the  lifecycle stages . This is a consequence of moving to a configuration data driven approach.
For those attending Action Week Lisbon we have scheduled a session Thursday Q  Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) under the Open Digital Architecture / OSS of the future track to gather information and opinions on what is needed.

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Dave Milham
TM Forum Chief Architect
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-12-2018 15:23
From: Jenny Huang
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

​

​Thanks Milind, this brings up another important point about the modeling aspects of the metadata.

The challenges that we are facing and the modeling/tool chain debates in the industry e.g. TOSCA, YANG, HEAT etc. IMHO, is that no two VFs, or even of the same 'VF type', will be designed the same way or have the same requirements in operations.

This means everything in concern has to be modeled (partial model does not compute!), this is far from practical. The ideal approach is to have an intent based model to allow business to select the options at run time to achieve deep optimization.

The cube of the package symbol actually has some significance, based on team member inputs it represents a 3-dimensional VF Modeling (a Metamodel)

• Business Semantic: describe both functional and nonfunctional aspects, such as licensing, testing, SLA etc. with rich metadata (this is the metadata that I kicked off this thread)
• Technical Details: describe the syntactical data format to be exchanged and protocols. (HEAT, NETCONF etc.)
• Behaviors: additional information that would modify the behaviors of its exposed function (policies, management APIs etc.)

 

We are leaning towards using TOSCA to properly represent all these information, the important thing is to figure out the content and their relationships.  Will be interested to hear more feedback on the direction that we are going and which organizations that we need to work with besides a few obvious ones.

------------------------------
Jenny S Huang
AT&T Services Inc., Standards and Industry Alliances
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: 01-11-2018 05:05
From: Milind Bhagwat
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

​I wonder if we need to include APIs and recipes which could be in the form of scripts. These could be standards based.

------------------------------
Milind Bhagwat
BT Group plc

Hello Jenny,

Do you know any plan when some standard will come out for OLM work as i reviewed the ONAP Amsterdam release and this part of VNF packaging  i can not see also in ETSI SOL-3 details for SLA , O&M is missing primarily they focus more on resource orchestration only .

Also i do not think represent every request of API as script is good idea as for On boarding we are using many API's  in a sequence so how will we represent all those different states in one script ?

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Saad Ullah Sheikh
Chief Architect - Consultant NFV , SDN and Telco Cloud
Saudi Telecom Company
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​Hi Saad, 

If I understood your comment correctly, I think there are a few parts to your question:

1. When will the OLM team produce standards specifications for nonfunctional metadata as indicated in the VF Package, my answers (a short answer to your question is on point F):
   1. The overall concept is documented in IG1141 R17.5
   2. Recommendation of PackageID and License metadata is in IG1141A R17.5
   3. Recommendation of VF categories and VF types are in IG1141B R17.5
   4. Skeleton of the entire VF package metadata and related standards is documented in TR269 R17.0 ( this one is a bit out of date)
   5. However, after done all those work we thought it will be useful to tap into broader vendor communities and other SDOs for inputs so we have also created a RACI chart for all related SDOs and open source projects that we need to work together
   6. The latest TM Forum thinking is that we will consolidate all of the requirements then submit to OASIS TOSCA TC as a joint development effort. i.e. We need to properly model both the function and nonfunctional together and figure out the best way to represent them that is easy for the vendors to adopt and easy to validate.
2. Specifically, on SLA
   • TM Forum did some initial analysis work of virtualization impact on SLA, documented in IG1120 back in 2014. SLA metadata will be part of the work as described in #1 above.
3. Question about representing management APIs in script (DSL/template?)

• I think your assessment is correct. I believe currently most of the industry implementation have modeled partial of the mgmt APIs and config information as part of the "Functional Descriptor" as denoted in the package diagram (using TOSCA, YANG … templates), but they are disconnected from the rest of the information that SPs also need inputs from the vendors  for broader business and operations lifecycle mgmt. Today, those information are exchanged manually hence a major barrier for zero touch. All these need to be properly modeled i.e. the package itself needs to be governed by a metamodel … I think TOSCA has the potential be the metamodel but now we need to model the content that are specific for the telecom operation needs + associate metamodel enhancement if required. (this will be beyond the resource/service modeling but looking holistically from business and operations aspects too.)

Hope this helps.

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Jenny S Huang
AT&T Services Inc., Standards and Industry Alliances
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 02-01-2018 06:44
From: Saad Ullah Sheikh
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

Hello Jenny,

Do you know any plan when some standard will come out for OLM work as i reviewed the ONAP Amsterdam release and this part of VNF packaging  i can not see also in ETSI SOL-3 details for SLA , O&M is missing primarily they focus more on resource orchestration only .

Also i do not think represent every request of API as script is good idea as for On boarding we are using many API's  in a sequence so how will we represent all those different states in one script ?

------------------------------
Saad Ullah Sheikh
Chief Architect - Consultant NFV , SDN and Telco Cloud
Saudi Telecom Company
------------------------------

​Interesting observations
In the related ZOOM Hybrid Infrastructure Platform ( HIP) project we have defined a set of Business Services which we call Platform Capabilities . In most cases these Platform Capabilities are realised as sequences of  multiple API calls.  Reusable examples are documented in TMF070B Advanced Platform Deployment Blueprints R17.5.0  Section 8  Scenarios. In most case multiple APIs are called. These external views of a Platform view and how the APIs are called /sequenced /orchestrated has been used to analyse the business models for 5G in  IG1152 Dynamic Network Slices Management and Business Models R17.0.1 and will be discussed this week at Action Week 5G Network Slice Management Sequence Charts ZOOM-279  if you have acces to the core team confluence areas . It is base don use of UML Sequence charts

For the ONAP perspective we expect to see some similar ONAP external views to be developed for the  ONAP use cases.
However the  current focus we see in ONAP is to understand how  ONAP maps the external APIs to the internal ONAP components.
This is  work in progress
My expectation is that we will need to do something similar for the Onboarding and Lifecycle management (OLM) processes but the current priority is on defining the metadata that is need to support the automated onboarding processes.

------------------------------
Dave Milham
TM Forum Chief Architect
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 02-01-2018 06:44
From: Saad Ullah Sheikh
Subject: TM Forum Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (OLM) work and your inputs

Hello Jenny,

Do you know any plan when some standard will come out for OLM work as i reviewed the ONAP Amsterdam release and this part of VNF packaging  i can not see also in ETSI SOL-3 details for SLA , O&M is missing primarily they focus more on resource orchestration only .

Also i do not think represent every request of API as script is good idea as for On boarding we are using many API's  in a sequence so how will we represent all those different states in one script ?

------------------------------
Saad Ullah Sheikh
Chief Architect - Consultant NFV , SDN and Telco Cloud
Saudi Telecom Company
------------------------------