OpenStack Summit May 2015 Vancouver

Andriod achieves great success as a customized Linux for mobile derives. Similar to Linux, OpenStack as a general cloud OS need to be customized for different scenarios, of which Telco NFV is one.

While OpenStack is a competitive candidate for the virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) in the NFV architecture, existing interfaces provided by OpenStack are not intuitive to be used as the northbound interface exposing to the upper layer applications(e.g. orchestrator, OSS/BSS). NFV functions like resource reservation/allocation, service chain, QoS, and policy are split and distributed to various OpenStack components without consistency. For example, while the VNF manager requests to create a VNF instance, it will consequently invoke several OpenStack APIs from Nova, Neutron or more. It would be intuitive for the Telco NFV Scenario if only one API can express this request.

This topic will discuss how to customize OpenStack by providing a set of consistent and intuitive NBI for the Telco NFV Scenario.

As we studied many NFV use-cases, most of them follows the same operation pattern:
  - Create network elements;
  - Generate links for the connectivity;
  - Identify flows;
  - Apply policies.
Or the combination of these operations.

Accordingly, we can derive NBI models, and generate the NFV customized NBI based on the model and pattern.

This topic will also refer to implementations in the OPNVF project.