Manuel Peuster

DevOps for network function virtualisation: an architectural approach

The Service Programming and Orchestration for Virtualised Software Networks SONATA project targets both the flexible programmability of software networks and the optimisation of their deployments by means of integrating Development and Operations in order to accelerate industry adoption of software networks and reduce time-to-market for networked services. SONATA supports network function chaining and orchestration, making service platforms modular and easier to customise to the needs of different service providers, and introduces a specialised Development and Operations model for supporting developers.

MeDICINE: Rapid prototyping of production-ready network services in multi-PoP environments

Virtualized network services consisting of multiple individual network functions are already today deployed across multiple sites, so called multi-PoP (points of presence) environments. This allows to improve service performance by optimizing its placement in the network. But prototyping and testing of these complex distributed software systems becomes extremely challenging. The reason is that not only the network service as such has to be tested but also its integration with management and orchestration systems. Existing solutions, like simulators, basic network emulators, or local cloud testbeds, do not support all aspects of these tasks. To this end, we introduce MeDICINE, a novel NFV prototyping platform that is able to execute production-ready network functions, provided as software containers, in an emulated multi-PoP environment. These network functions can be controlled by any third-party management and orchestration system that connects to our platform through standard interfaces. Based on this, a developer can use our platform to prototype and test complex network services in a realistic environment running on his laptop.

Understand Your Chains: Towards Performance Profile-Based Network Service Management

Allocating resources to virtualized network functions and services to meet service level agreements is a challenging task for NFV management and orchestration systems. This becomes even more challenging when agile development methodologies, like DevOps, are applied. In such scenarios, management and orchestration systems are continuously facing new versions of functions and services which makes it hard to decide how much resources have to be allocated to them to provide the expected service performance. One solution for this problem is to support resource allocation decisions with performance behavior information obtained by profiling techniques applied to such network functions and services. In this position paper, we analyze and discuss the components needed to generate such performance behavior information within the NFV DevOps workflow. We also outline research questions that identify open issues and missing pieces for a fully integrated NFV profiling solution. Further, we introduce a novel profiling mechanism that is able to profile virtualized network functions and entire network service chains under different resource constraints before they are deployed on production infrastructure.

E-State: Distributed state management in elastic network function deployments

Elastic deployments of virtualized network functions (VNFs) can automatically scale the amount of used resources in relation to their workload. This is often done by starting new VNF instances or stopping old ones. A problem of these scale operations is that most network functions are stateful and their internal state is not automatically migrated when traffic is redistributed. As a result, mechanisms are needed to exchange or migrate internal network function state between VNF instances. This paper presents a state management framework that creates logically distributed state memory on top of elastically deployed VNFs used to share state information between these VNFs. We introduce a novel programming model that provides both a local and a global view of the state to each VNF instance. Further, we compare the performance of our prototype to a centralized and a distributed in-memory database solution.

A topology-aware adaptive deployment framework for elastic applications

In Distributed Cloud Computing, applications are deployed over thousands of geographically distributed cloud sites. This new deployment approach promises not only improved applications quality of service but enables deploying network-critical applications otherwise not possible. A previously settled, static allocation of enough resources at each site is expensive. Adapting resource allocations during application lifetime could dramatically reduce expenses. They are triggered by complex algorithms as a reaction of changes in measured performance data. However, such adaptation algorithms and their performance data depends on specific applications requirements, constrains, and on optimization goals. Some interactive applications need a low packet round trip time. Other streaming applications need a high data rate to the user. Besides these individual characteristics of an adaptation, similarities exists in the management of such a geographical distribution: Applications and their components are deployed within Virtual Machines. The components have to find and communicate with each other. Motivated by this, we present a framework taking care of necessary common functionality while been highly customizable to support a wide range of adaptation. Additionally, integrated adaptations can utilize combined application- and infrastructure- level data and are also able to reconfigure the application and the infrastructure. Finally, a steering-system supports state-ful and multi-tier applications to be deployed in an elastic and dynamic way.

SONATA: Service programming and orchestration for virtualized software networks

In conventional large-scale networks, creation and management of network services are costly and complex tasks that often consume a lot of resources, including time and manpower. Network softwarization and network function virtualization have been introduced to tackle these problems, aiming at decreasing costs and complexity of implementing new services, maintaining the implemented services, and managing available resources in service provisioning platforms and underlying infrastructures. To experience the full potential of these approaches, innovative development support tools and service provisioning environments are needed. To answer these needs, we introduce the architecture of the open-source SONATA system, a service programming, orchestration, and management framework. We present a development toolchain for virtualized network services, fully integrated with a service platform and orchestration system. We introduce the modular and flexible architecture of our system and discuss its main components and features, such as function- and service-specific managers that allow fine-grained service management, slicing support to facilitate multi-tenancy, recursiveness for improved scalability, and full-featured DevOps support.

An evaluation testbed for adaptive, topology-aware deployment of elastic applications

Cloud application providers who deploy their application at different cloud sites usually aim for close-by processing of user requests, benefiting from improved quality of service, and traffic reduction [4]. In this context, we dynamically scale applications to reduce costs by automating their deployment and adapting their resource allocation dynamically. We research the following questions: Where to allocate how many resources and how to apply the allocation? Which information is needed and how to exchange it? How can applications cope with ever changing resource allocations? To practically evaluate our solutions, we created a flexible testbed. We share our insides and implementation to researchers tackling the diverse subproblems, various optimization goals, potentials for cost savings, and QoS improvements. We provide software with install instructions to construct your own private testbed [5]. Our testbed is two-layered: The bottom layer allows to test VM deployment on emulated, geographically distributed sites. It can be independently reused, is self-sufficient, and thus constitutes a small testbed on its own, the GeoDist Testbed (Section 2). The top layer allows to test adaptations and VM placement algorithms interactively or through predefined scenarios. Both layers together form the Adaptation Testbed (Section 3). Its capabilities are demonstrated in three different scenarios (Section 4).

A flexible multi-pop infrastructure emulator for carrier-grade MANO systems

Developing a virtualized network service does not only involve the implementation and configuration of the network functions it is composed of but also its integration and test with management solutions that will control the service in its production environment. These integration tasks require testbeds that offer the needed network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI), like OpenStack, introducing a lot of management and maintenance overheads. Such testbed setups become even more complicated when the multi point-of-presence (PoP) case, with multiple infrastructure installations, is considered. In this demo, we showcase an emulation platform that executes containerized network services in user-defined multi-PoP topologies. The platform does not only allow network service developers to locally test their services but also to connect realworld management and orchestration solutions to the emulated PoPs. During our interactive demonstration we focus on the integration between the emulated infrastructure and state-of-theart orchestration solutions like SONATA or OSM.

An Architecture for Energy-aware On-demand Mobile Network Management

The increasing amount of mobile traffic leads to a significantly higher energy consumption of mobile networks that is mainly caused by the high number of required base stations. One recent solution for this is based on a two-layered network that uses long-range macro cells to provide a full coverage signaling overlay and short-range small cells for fast data transmissions. These small cells can be switched off when they are not needed and allow network-wide energy optimizations. This paper presents an architecture that extends existing mobile networks to integrate a small cell layer that supports on-demand cell activation. We discuss how additional small cells can be interconnected with existing core components and how they can be controlled by a resource management component. Finally, a Wi-Fi based proof of concept testbed implementation is presented that demonstrates the feasibility of the approach.

A network service development kit supporting the end-to-end lifecycle of NFV-based telecom services

Ongoing evolutions in the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) area show that software will play an increasingly important role within the telecommunication industry. It enables telco providers to faster introduce telecom services, combined with new possibilities to optimize and fine-tune operational performance. New virtualization and softwarization methods support fine-grained scaling of resources and highly-customizable configuration settings. Additionally, multi-datacenter topologies are available to deploy the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) a service consists of. In this context, specialized tools are needed for debugging and validating the deployment, placement, chaining, configuration and scaling of network services, before the operator deploys the service in production. This demo showcases an open-source Software Development Kit (SDK), built to support NFV-based services throughout their whole lifecycle. During the demo, several example VNFs will be loaded into the SDK environment to demonstrate the features a service developer is envisioned to use, while either creating or updating NFV-based telecom services.