Presentació a càrrec de Maria Isabel Gandia, cap de Comunicacions del CSUC, duta a terme al 10è SIG-NOC Meeting, celebrat els dies 13 i 14 de novembre de 2019 a Praga.

1. Orchestration, Automation and
Virtualisation (OAV) in GÉANT
www.geant.org
Tim Chown, Jisc
Maria Isabel Gandia, CSUC/RedIRIS
WP6-T2 / Consensus Building
10th SIG-NOC Meeting
Prague, 14 November 2019

2. 2 www.geant.org
The GN4-3 project structure
2 |

3. 3 www.geant.org
Where does OAV fit in?
3 |
OAV

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OAV
• OAV: Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation.
• Orchestration and Automation are needed to make a smarter use of
resources:
• Enable faster service delivery / decrease delivery time
• Reduce the number of human errors
• Decrease the amount of manual work
• Lower the costs of service delivery
• Ensure configuration consistency
• Provide better reporting
• Increase efficiency
• Increase configuration uniformity and consistency
• The subtask aims to promote wider adoption of general OAV
principles within the NREN community.

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• Most of the work known so far is single-domain and domain-specific.
• It was first necessary to understand the current situation for OAV
adoption in the community.
• A period of consensus building at the start of GN4-3 was required
• It started with an NREN OAV survey to:
• Learn about strategy/actions of each NREN related to OAV.
• Explore if there are common OAV use cases, ideas, and issues.
• Recognise possible areas of collaboration among NRENs and GÉANT.
• Determine possible future work in WP6 (or other WPs) that could be of
benefit to as many partners as possible for identified use case(s).
Investigation of OAV in the GÉANT community

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The NREN OAV Survey
• 35 questions organised into five areas:
1. Existing OSS/BSS platforms
2. Current OAV use cases
3. Challenges in adopting OAV
4. Future OAV use cases
5. How GÉANT might help the NRENs
• Sent to the APM (STF) representatives of each NREN
(cc’ing NREN GA contacts).
• 31 NRENs replied
Automation
61%
Virtualization
31%
Orchestration
8%
WHAT WORK IS
IMPLEMENTED FIRST

7. 7 www.geant.org
Discussion of OAV Survey Results
• Within the GÉANT community: GN4-3 Future Service Strategy Workshop, May 2019:
• Around 70 NREN participants
• https://wiki.geant.org/display/gn43wp3/GN4-
3+Future+Service+Strategy+Workshop?preview=/120492175/122756591/2019-05-09-OAV-
Survey-Results-by-Topic.pdf
• With the international community, beyond GÉANT: BoF session at TNC, June19:
• OAV activities in the USA (Internet2, Esnet)
• OAV activities in Australia (Aarnet)
• https://wiki.geant.org/display/OAV/OAV+BoF+@+TNC19
17
14
4
3
1
0 5 10 15 20
At Production Currently
Other Orchestration
Virtualization Automation
7
5
5
1
0 2 4 6 8
Test/Under Development
Virtualization Orchestration Automation

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Survey & Discussion Results
• NREN consultation clearly showed
• That there is a diversity of perspectives
• NRENs are at varying stages of OAV concerning implementation /
experience
• There is a need for a strategy for OAV in GÉANT
• Where do we want to be in 4 years in the community?
• How do we want orchestration and automation to function at the beginning
of GN5?
• It’s important to agree on next steps, with the goal of allowing the benefits
of OAV to be applied in a hardware-agnostic, multi-domain approach.
• Results available in detail in D6.2: Automation and Orchestration of
Services in the GÉANT Community:
https://www.geant.org/Projects/GEANT_Project_GN4-3/GN43_deliverables/D6-
2_Automation-and-Orchestration-of-Services-in-the-GEANT-Community.pdf

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Survey Results: Service areas where OAV principles are expected
to be applied in the next two years
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Network
operations &
maintenance
Network
connections
Hw
independent
control of
network
Consistent net
elements
update and
verification
Network
security
Modular
provisioning &
agility
Service
ordering
Cost efficiency
improvements

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Survey Results: Skills needed for OAV and whether people in
NRENs have them
• Software development skills
• Software development and
networking skills (unicorns?)
• Additional personnel

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Survey Results: Concerns by NOC teams around increased
automation
• Concerns more widely reported are related to:
• Automating failures due to mistakes / inadequate software / reduced
troubleshooting capabilities
• Lack of ability for tailor-made services / lack of flexibility
• Lack of appropriate employee skills / need for training / lots of required
effort to setup
• However they are mostly not considered blockers and
most NRENs seem willing to move forward if the right
conditions are met
Yes
57%
No+
N/A
43%

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Survey & Discussion Results
• Common pains:
• Manpower - number, skill, expertise
• Brownfield - existing systems, hard to make changes in
production, CI CD
• Priorities - existing systems; continuous operations vs. new
development
• Time - split between the operations and R&D
• Cost - additional people, additional software, software
replacement
• Limitations of proprietary solutions
12 |
Common problems call for joint work / streamlined effort

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• Existing platforms:
• Wide variety of components and
systems in use
• Mostly OSS, some BSS, a few with
OSS-BSS integration
• Proprietary, in-house and open-
source
• No obvious common single
direction or best practice for OAV
• Little use of standard data models
and APIs that facilitate OAV
 Existing and new systems could benefit from more
systematic approach / model / architecture to
streamline the efforts
 Opportunity exists for work on BSS and OSS – BSS
integration
Survey & Discussion Results
37
%
20
%
27
%
47
%
47
%

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GÉANT Potential Contribution
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
Providing data model(s)
Providing methodology
GEANT should organize workshop & training
Developing software
Providing tools/automation repository
Other ways - provide practice guide
Other ways - Demonstrate technology in a working/real/use
case /production environment
Other ways - need OAV architecture blueprint combined with
API

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Potential areas of work
• Defining a common NREN OAV architecture
• Including inputs from interested OAV-engaged NRENs
• To serve as a starting point for OAV-starting NRENs
• OAV workshops / focus groups
• Sharing experience, knowledge, expertise, best practices,...
• Topics including but not limited to code, tools, processes, procedures
• Consultancy, expertise and training
• Helping NRENs to implement OAV
• Topics including but not limited to OAV basics, principles, tools,...
• Software Repository
• Scripts, libraries,...
• By open-source principles
• (Not necessarily WP6 area of work)
15 |

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Focus Groups
• As a result, several Focus Groups (FG) were established.
• Designed to be (initially) short-lived with specific outputs
• Currently working on:
• FG on Terminology
• FG on Architecture
• FG on Use Cases (first case, CNaaS)
• FG on OAV public wiki
• More Focus Groups can be established if needed
• One being explored for data transfer infrastructures (DTNs)

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Focus Group: Terminology
• The Workshop showed a need for an agreement on
common terminology.
• The idea is to have a common ground of understanding.
• Currently, there aren’t documents in the literature that
include all this information.
• The FG is building a list of relevant OAV terms and
acronyms with commonly accepted definitions and
references.
• The list of terms will be agreed within the subtask team
and then shared.

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Focus Group: Architecture
• Study on a variety of OAV architectures and frameworks to look at
common approaches that could be considered as part of a GÉANT
strategy.
• Various architectures are investigated in a broad overview in a first
round, considering the OAV aspects covered in those architectures.
• The list of architectures to analyse includes:
• Standards based architectures (ETSI, MEF, TMFORUM…)
• Commercial products (Anuta, Ciena, Cisco,…)
• Some of them will be selected for a second round, to explore them in a
detailed analysis (deep dive), considering:
• GÉANT and NREN community requirements (list of requirements built)
• Global approaches, standardisations and strategies
• Goal: to identify a service architecture that allows the creation of new
services and workflows that can be shared within the community in a
multi-domain fashion with a corresponding orchestration process.

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Focus Group: CNaaS (Campus Network Management as a Service)
• NRENs offering CNaaS use OAV techniques. Different approaches and targets.
Clear need to share information. Evidence of high level of NREN interest.
• The initial purpose of the FG was to:
• Liaise with NRENs that are working on CNaaS.
• Collect information.
• Provide a Service Definition (SD) template as a reference, easy to adapt and replicate.
• The FG is working on D6.4 (Campus Network Management), that will include
the CNaaS service definition, examples from the community and a summary
of the workshop.
• The CNaaS service definition was presented in the very well attended
Workshop on Network Management and Monitoring:
https://wiki.geant.org/download/attachments/131629403/CNaaSServiceDefin
ition-NEMMO-WS-MIG-GN4-3-WP6-
T3.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1571649512713&api=v2
• The same model used for CNaaS to approach the community and define the
scope of the work will be used to work around other topics.

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Focus Group: OAV public wiki
• For knowledge sharing and global exchange.
• Public OAV wiki at:
• https://wiki.geant.org/display/OAV/
• Group works continuously on an internal mirror site.
• Updates to public wiki on a regular basis.
• OAV related documents, links to standardisation bodies, events and
infoshares.
• Wiki site contains “OAV Community Portal”
• https://wiki.geant.org/display/OAV/OAV+COMMUNITY+PORTAL
• Each NREN can present their OAV work there or provide links.
• NRENs willing to share information or find out more about OAV can reach
the team at gn4-3-wp6-oav@lists.geant.org

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Next steps
• Finish the work on the current FGs (Architecture,
Terminology, CNaaS).
• Create new FGs if needed (other use cases…)
• Continuously disseminate the results of the focus groups
and knowledge exchange (Wiki, etc).
• Provide a tools repository where NRENs can share their
orchestration and automation scripts, tools, templates,
etc.
• Anything else…?

22. Thank you
www.geant.org
Any questions?
Or email us:
tim.chown@jisc.ac.uk
mariaisabel.gandia@csuc.cat
© GÉANT Association on behalf of the GN4 Phase 3 project (GN4-3).
The research leading to these results has received funding from
the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under Grant Agreement No. 856726 (GN4-3).