Multi-Cloud VNF Onboarding on Azure and OpenStack via ONAP

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For those not familiar with our product, Cloudify is an open source, model-driven orchestrator based on TOSCA which enables organizations to deploy and manage the full lifecycle of applications across multiple clouds. One of the strongest aspects of Cloudify is its ability to deploy multiple virtual network functions (VNF) in a multi-cloud (or Multi-VIM) environment, public/private or public/public, service chain and manage those services from a single dashboard. Cloudify also manages the full lifecycle operations of those applications, from self-healing to auto-scaling and more, along with metrics and any other data collection required by the user.

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It is because of these capabilities, which make any application portable across cloud platforms, that we were recently asked by Microsoft and TM Forum to demonstrate how Cloudify is used to onboard a VNF, which would essentially be built with ONAP’s Service Design and Creation (SDC) tool, on Azure and OpenStack as well as gather metrics and telemetry via ONAP’s Data Collection, Analytics, and Events (DCAE) component.

Fortigate deployed on Azure

In this demo, Cloudify first configures the Azure and OpenStack clouds with a TOSCA-based blueprint.
Next, we worked with Fortinet‘s Fortigate vFirewall (vFW) network function and deployed the same baseline image first on Azure, through the Marketplace, and then OpenStack. In order to connect the two vFirewalls, separate machines were launched with port forwarding mechanisms for each of the cloud instances in a microservices architecture.

Fortigate dashboard

For more details on our ONAP work, see our previous posts about Cloudify deploying OOM with Kubernetes and onboarding ONAP and ARIA TOSCA Service Orchestration in ONAP. Cloudify is also a main tool used by the DCAE service. Also, check out our ONAP Solution Brief.

Back to the demo, which was actually put together in only a matter of hours. After creating the VNFs and deploying them, Cloudify then creates the service chain of the firewalls by connecting the services on both Azure and OpenStack. Cloudify is also able to manage the full lifecycle of those applications as well as provide all of the application KPIs for any endpoint as well as any other metrics that are defined in the blueprint.
Cloudify is built in an open manner, and can therefore connect with any external API to manage those components along with any other application running in the environment through a single blueprint or group of composite blueprints.

Fortigate sample blueprint

You can see the entire exciting demo in the video below: