By Pattabi Ayyasami, Tirumalesh Ramaiah Reddy; Comcast
As Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have become modern approaches to quickly deliver and offer network services such as SD-WAN, Security and other value-added services using service chains. Declarative & model driven orchestration technologies like TOSCA has become the fabric to develop Network Automation platform to manage lifecycle of these network service applications and build an ecosystem for multiple vendors to participate & integrate with their VNF solutions.
Comcast architecture leverages several information models and orchestration tools including TOSCA and YANG to enable complete life cycle management of SDN and NFV functionalities and to configure physical and virtual devices that comprise an end-to-end service.
The paper describes how TOSCA is being used to describe orchestration between resources across complex end to end service(s) such as SD-WAN and Cloud Security. Demonstrate the capabilities of TOSCA like substitution/service decomposition for vendor abstraction to realize some of the VNF’s, interface and life cycle operations used for the implementation aspects, requirement, capability types, node referencing features, define and visualize end-to-end service as a topology graph of inter-connected nodes and to navigate across connected services.
YANG is a data modeling language used to describe the device configuration. Device/network configuration properties are modeled as YANG. The syntax and semantic constraints and capabilities offered by YANG are made use of during service validation and activation