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Architecture

High-Level Introduction

OpenSlice architecture

OpenSlice consists of:

  • Web frontend User Interface (UI) that consists of mainly two portal categories:
    1. An NFV portal allowing users to onboard VNFDs/NSDs to facility’s NFVOs and self-service management
    2. Several TMF-family portals (Product, Service, Resource, Testing) which allow users to browse the respective layers of a modern BSS/OSS solution
  • An API gateway that proxies the internal APIs, which are used by the Web frontend as well as any other 3rd party services, and consist of:
    1. A microservice offering TMF-compliant API services (e.g. Product/Service/Resource Catalog API, Service Ordering API, etc)
    2. A microservice offering NFV-compliant API services (e.g. VNFD/NSD onboarding and management, etc) allowing to manage multiple NFVOs and store VNFDs and NSDs in the respective catalogues
  • A Message Bus used by all microservices to exchange messages either via message Queues or via publish/subscribe Topics
  • An Authentication Server implementing Oauth2 authentication scheme
  • A microservice that is capable to interface with an issue management system (e.g. it raises an issue to all related stakeholders - CSPs, NOPs, CSCs - that a new Service Order is requested)
  • A Central Logging microservice that logs all distributed actions into an Elasticsearch cluster
  • A Service Orchestrator (SO) solution that will fulfill Service Ordering requests by propagating the orchestration actions to underlying components (e.g. NFVOs or Kubernetes) or to external SOs
  • A MANO Client microservice which interfaces with SOL005-compliant NFVOs (synchronizing artifacts and propagating actions)
  • A Custom Resource (CR) to TMF bridge (CRIDGE) microservice which interfaces with Kubernetes
  • A Metrics Retrieval Component (METRICO) which interfaces with external monitoring tools, retrieving and injecting desired metrics into OpenSlice orchestration pipeline
  • An Assurance Services component which generates and monitors alerts, as well executing defined actions based on the latter
  • A visualization server (KROKI) microservice which enables a intuitive illustration of dependency graphs and interactions

Microservices Deployment

The following figure depicts how OpenSlice microservices are deployed

OpenSlice microservices network deployment

Deploying OpenSlice in multi-domain scenarios

A typical deployment across domains, involves some typical components:

  1. an OSS/BSS to allow customers access the service catalog and perform service orders,
  2. a Service Orchestrator (SO) component for executing the service order workflow,
  3. a Network Functions Virtualization Orchestrator (NFVO) or Kubernetes for configuring the network resources.

TMF Open APIs are introduced not only for exposing catalogues and accepting service orders, but also implementing the East-West interfaces between the domains, fulfilling also the LSO requirements as introduced by MEF.

The following figure shows how OpenSlice could be used in such scenarios:

Openslice multi-domain-architecture

See more at Consuming Services From External Partner Organizations.