Standard

Cloud Computing terminology

Common technologies and techniques

Cloud computing data flow, data categories and data use: Fundamentals

Network and technical requirements in support of Inter-Cloud (the Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum is discontinued).

Inter-Cloud interface specification on resources data model for network control (the Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum is discontinued).

Inter-Cloud interface specification on protocols (the Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum is discontinued)

The present document describes a quality accountability framework for NFV. This release focuses on service quality management of network services, VNFs, NFV infrastructure, management and orchestration elements.
 
The present document describes the following aspects of the Quality Accountability Framework:

1. Roles, covered in clause 4 Roles in the NFV Ecosystem.
2. Responsibilities, covered in clauses 5 Responsibilities by Role and 6 Responsibilities for Key Cloud
3. Characteristics. Service quality measurements and demarcation points, covered in clause 7 Quality Measurement Framework.

The present document develops a report detailing methods for active monitoring of VNFs, NFVI and E2E network services and detection of failures. It addresses the following two aspects of active monitoring:

1. Periodic testing of VNFs and service chains in a live environment to ensure proper functionality and performance adherence to SLAs.
2. Failure prevention and detection - Active monitoring methods for failure prevention (proactive) or timely detection and recovery from failures. Failures include loss or degradation of network connectivity, loss or degradation of session capacity, loss of services, VM failures, VM stalls, etc.

The present document proposes that the monitoring agents be on boarded into the NFV environment, just like other VNFs.

The present document describes the models and methods for end-to-end reliability in NFV environments and software upgrade from a resilience perspective. The scope of the present document covers the following items:

• Study reliability estimation models for NFV including modelling architecture.
•  Study NFV reliability and availability methods.
• Develop reliability estimation models for these methods, including dynamic operational aspects such as impact of load and life-cycle operations.
• Study reliability issues during NFV software upgrade and develop upgrade mechanisms for improving resilience.
• Develop guidelines to realise the differentiation of resiliency for different services.

The present document describes a study of how today's Cloud/Data Centre techniques can be adapted to achieve scalability, efficiency, and reliability in NFV environments. These techniques are designed for managing shared processing state with low-latency and high-availability requirements. They are shown to be application-independent that can be applied generally, rather than have each VNF use its own idiosyncratic method for meeting these goals. Although an individual VNF could manage its own scale and replication, the techniques described here require a single coherent manager, such as an orchestrator, to manage the scale and capacity of many disparate VNFs. Today's IT/Cloud Data Centres exhibit very high availability levels by limiting the amount of unique state in a single element and creating a virtual network function from a number of small replicated components whose functional capacity can be scaled in and out by adjusting the running number of components. Reliability and availability for these type of VNFs is provided by a number of small replicated components. When an individual component fails, little state is lost and the overall VNF experiences minimal change in functional capacity. Capacity failures can be recovered by instantiating additional components. The present document considers a variety of use cases, involving differing levels of shared state and different reliability requirements; each case is explored for application-independent ways to manage state, react to failures, and respond to increased load. The intent of the present document is to demonstrate the feasibility of these techniques for achieving high availability for VNFs and provide guidance on Best Practices for scale out system architectures for the management of reliability. As such, the architectures described in the present document are strictly illustrative in nature.
 
Accordingly, the scope of the present document is stated as follows:

• Provide an overview of how such architectures are currently deployed in Cloud/Data Centres.
• Describe various categories of state and how scaling state can be managed.
• Describe scale-out techniques for instantiating new VNFs in a single location where failures have occurred or unexpected traffic surges have been experienced. Scale-out may be done over multiple servers within a location or in a server in the same rack or cluster within any given location. Scaling out over servers in multiple locations can be investigated in follow-up studies.
• Develop guidelines for monitoring state such that suitable requirements for controlling elements (e.g. orchestrator) can be formalized in follow-up studies.

The present document focuses on unique aspects related to network and service resiliency in a virtualised network environment. The challenges result from failures of virtualised network functions, failures of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure arising from conditions such as design faults, intrinsic wear out, operational mistakes, or other adverse conditions, e.g. natural disasters, excessive traffic demand, etc.
 
The scope of the present document includes:

• Usecase analysis for reliability and availability in a virtualised network environment.
• Analysis of service availability levels.
• Identification of requirements for maintaining network resiliency and service availability, the focus being additional requirements introduced by virtualisation. The mechanisms to be considered include the following:
  •     Network function migration within and across system boundaries.
  •     Failure detection and reporting at the various layers.
  •     Failure prediction, prevention, and remediation.
  •     State management.
  •     Solving network availability issues caused by overload/call blocking conditions.
• Engineering and deployment guidelines for maintaining network resiliency and ensuring service availability.

The present document defines a framework for use within ETSI NFV ISG to coordinate and promote public demonstrations of Proofs of Concept (PoC) illustrating key aspects of NFV.
 
The objective for the PoCs is to build commercial awareness and confidence and encourage development of an open ecosystem by integrating components from different players.

 
This framework outlines:

• rationale for NFV ISG PoCs;
• NFV ISG PoC process;
• format and criteria for NFV ISG PoC Proposals;
• NFV ISG PoC Report format and requirements.