Cloudify Orchestrates Service Function Chaining (SFC) at MEF
The MEF’s Goal and How Cloudify Fits the Bill
The MEF is focused on enabling dynamic network services for the digital economy and the hyper-connected world by providing businesses an on-demand, cloud-connected, secure, and assured experience. It provides a practical evolution toward interconnected, orchestrated, and automated networks powered by Open LSO (lifecycle service orchestration), SDN, and NFV implementations. Toward this goal, the MEF has established a technical framework that includes architecture, information models, services, operational processes, LSO, open source implementations, and certification programs. Their work is conducted internally and – under the guidance of the MEF UNITE program – in cooperation with global standards organizations and open source projects.
Cloudify is an open source, multi-VIM TOSCA-based orchestrator which comes with core capabilities and plugins that extend core capabilities, e.g. a Netconf/YANG plugin which talks southbound with network devices. Cloudify manages the life cycle (LCM) of services and VNFs.
The MEF definition of LSO (lifecycle service orchestration) includes Cloudify as the Open Source Orchestrator.
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Demonstrating Cloudify’s SFC Capabilities
Cloudify will be demonstrating Service Function Chaining (SFC) capabilities at the upcoming MEF Hackathon in Rome. In this demo, we demonstrate the onboarding of a virtual firewall (vFW) which is chained to the ingress and egress endpoints of the UNI routers.
Cloudify makes use of the NRP PRESTO API to stitch the vFW into the right place in the service chain by using a Cloudify PRESTO plugin and forwarding constructs of the PRESTO API.
Leveraging this example, upper layers can use the Cloudify REST northbound API in conjunction with MEF LEGATO API to make use of the Cloudify orchestration engine.
Cloudify uses TOSCA as a data model to build the SFC constructs and build the chain. The vFW VNF comes with its own TOSCA blueprint and Cloudify uses TOSCA blueprint composition in conjunction with the PRESTO constructs to build this chain.
As depicted in the figure below we see:
- vFW VM is provisioned
- vFW software stack is installed on it
- vFW is added to the service chain using blueprint composition and PRESTO forward construct primitives
- Cloudify can monitor the VNF, auto-heal it as well scale-out based on KPIs collected (both infrastructure and application level KPIs).
More Open Source NFV Goodness
On another front, GigaSpaces recently announced ARIA, an open source, open governance TOSCA reference implementation, designed to make using TOSCA simple, which is already being implemented as part of Open-O, which is part of the Linux Foundation, and includes participants such as China Mobile.
The MEF Hackathon Rome includes major vendors and telecoms worldwide.