Consuming Services From External Partner Organizations

Intended Audience: OpenSlice Administrators

A typical deployment across domains, involves some typical components:

an OSS/BSS to allow customers access the Service Catalog and perform Service Orders,
a Service Orchestrator (SO) component for executing the service order workflow
a Network Orchestrator (e.g. Kubernetes, NFVO) or respective Resource Controllers
configurable network Resources

TMF Open APIs are primarily introduced for exposing Catalogues and accepting Service Orders, but also for implementing the East-West interfaces between the domains.

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

In OpenSlice, we use the TMF 632 Party Management model to specify external partner Organizations. Once done, external Organizations can exchange items and other information such as:

Import Service Specifications
Create a Service Order
Use the Service Inventory to query the status of the service ordered to the external partner organization

This functionality is not only limited between OpenSlice instances, but can be expanded to any external OSS that utilizes TMF v4 APIs.

Define an external partner Organization to consume services (East-West)

To define an external partner Organization, the user must possess the "ADMIN" role. The Organization management can be executed at the Services or Products Portal, under the Manage Entities -> Organizations tab.

When creating a new federated Organization, you must define an Organization Name and a Trading Name (optional). Once the Organization is created, you must define the necessary external Organization details as Characteristics for the synchronization process.

By minimum, you must define the following Characteristics:

EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_BASEURL: The Organization's domain, e.g. https://portal.openslice.eu
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2TOKENURI: The endpoint to obtain the OAUTH2 token, e.g. https://portal.openslice.eu/auth/realms/openslice/protocol/openid-connect/token
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_USERNAME: The authentication credentials (username), e.g. admin
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_PASSWORD: The authentication credentials (password), e.g. openslice
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_CLIENTREGISTRATIONID: An Organization identifier to setup the OAUTH Client, e.g. authOpensliceProvider
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2CLIENTID: The OAUTH Client ID, e.g. osapiWebClientId
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2CLIENTSECRET: The OAUTH Client secret, e.g. secret
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2SCOPES: The OAUTH scopes (must be ; separated - no space between), e.g. admin;read

The above Characteristics define an external Organization registration, which can be validated through the EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_STATUS once the partner registration process happens (HH:00 and HH:30, each hour). A successful synchronization populates the Characteristic with a similar value ISODATE: FULLSPECS SUCCESS, else a NOT CONFIGURED value appears.

Important Note: Although an external Organization is registered, you have to define which Service Characteristics shall be synchronized, so as for this process to make sense. Following, there are the available filtering option, all relative to the BASEURL:

EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_SERVICE_CATALOG_URLS: A filter of desired Service Specifications to be synced, e.g. /tmf-api/serviceCatalogManagement/v4/serviceSpecification?type=CustomerFacingServiceSpecification (synchronizes all CFSS).

If not specified, it defaults to "/tmf-api/serviceCatalogManagement/v4/serviceSpecification", which synchronizes everything

OR

EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_SERVICE_CATEGORY_URLS: A filter of desired Service Specifications within a Service Category, e.g. /tmf-api/serviceCatalogManagement/v4/serviceCategory/4136c0a2-1f6d-41e6-bb02-ae50c020925d (synchronizes all Service Specifications within the Service Category with the provided ID).

Multiple Service Categories' links can be specified and must be comma-separated (,) - no space between.

Once the synchronization process is successful, the filtered Service Specifications will appear in your OpenSlice instance under the Service Specifications List (Manage Service -> Service Specifications -> List Service Specification). You can distinguish externally synchronized Service Specifications from their description, as illustrated in the following figure.

You can now use the synchronized Service Specification into your Service bundle designs, which, when ordered, will delegate the instantiation to the the partner's Service Orchestrator, while also populating the initiator's Service Inventory.

As already introduced, this feature assumes that the partner OSS instance operates under TMF v4 APIs for Service Catalog and Ordering Management.

Specifically, it assumes the following URLs (relative to BASEURL) to get Service Specifications' information and issue Service Orders, respectively:

/tmf-api/serviceCatalogManagement/v4/serviceSpecification
/tmf-api/serviceOrdering/v4/serviceOrder

If a partner OSS instance is not following the above URLs, you may define custom ones during the partner Organization definition, populating the following characteristics:

EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_SERVICE_SPEC: The endpoint to get Service Specification information, e.g. /tmf/ServiceSpecification
EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_SERVICE_ORDER_URLS: The endpoint to issue a partner Service Order, e.g. /tmf/ServiceOrder

A JSON example of external partner Organization definition

An example Organization defined as JSON:

{
  "uuid": "1a09a8b5-6bd5-444b-b0b9-a73c69eb42ae",
  "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
  "@schemaLocation": null,
  "@type": null,
  "href": null,
  "name": "Portal External",
  "id": "1a09a8b5-6bd5-444b-b0b9-a73c69eb42ae",
  "isHeadOffice": null,
  "isLegalEntity": null,
  "nameType": null,
  "organizationType": null,
  "tradingName": null,
  "contactMedium": [],
  "creditRating": [],
  "existsDuring": null,
  "externalReference": [],
  "organizationChildRelationship": [],
  "organizationIdentification": [],
  "organizationParentRelationship": null,
  "otherName": [],
  "partyCharacteristic": [
    {
      "uuid": "3a2f7221-e0a2-4a6b-88d1-534c8e1963f6",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_CLIENTREGISTRATIONID",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "authOpensliceProvider",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "c24bb527-f178-4d38-9b93-2027c1732876",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_USERNAME",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "admin",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "27e45df8-414b-44c6-a5d5-3f064e2cfd3b",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_PASSWORD",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "openslice",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "e0e470b8-6024-4014-8a18-2333e5465ce1",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2CLIENTSECRET",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "secret",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "3e0de762-ac80-4c1e-a0a1-f265ff0899b4",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2SCOPES",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "admin;read",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "0bbb8314-f7f2-420d-9fed-ba054b15f886",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2TOKENURI",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "https://portal.openslice.eu/auth/realms/openslice/protocol/openid-connect/token",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "3a567de4-79eb-4006-a500-3e5229b44175",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_OAUTH2CLIENTID",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "osapiWebClientId",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "6dca729f-dbe1-46b7-89f1-5c4f9fe89d4e",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_BASEURL",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "https://portal.openslice.eu",
        "alias": null
      }
    },
    {
      "uuid": "be685fe0-60c6-4aeb-81ba-af9f2063659b",
      "@baseType": "BaseEntity",
      "@schemaLocation": null,
      "@type": null,
      "href": null,
      "name": "EXTERNAL_TMFAPI_SERVICE_CATEGORY_URLS",
      "valueType": null,
      "value": {
        "value": "/tmf-api/serviceCatalogManagement/v4/serviceCategory/ef2c90dd-b65e-4a9f-a9c3-427c9fb0219b",
        "alias": null
      }
    }
  ],
  "relatedParty": [],
  "status": null,
  "taxExemptionCertificate": []
}