UNIFY, a research project funded by the EU, released as open source a set of tools targeting operations and development in software-defined infrastructure and collectively known as the SP-DevOps Toolkit (URL). The SP-DevOps Toolkit includes an advanced network congestion detector, a scalable messaging bus that supports tenant isolation and aggregation, and a number of verification tools that address verification of VNFFGs both at a pre- and post-deployment stage. Furthermore, the project developed and publicly documented a set of workflows covering Observability, Troubleshooting and Verification aspects of software-defined infrastructure. The talk will examine the OPNFV Brahmaputra release, identify opportunities that could potentially be approached by hardened versions of the Toolkit tools and discuss how different OPNFV projects may be able to benefit from requirements supported by these tools as well as from potentially integrating or enhancing some of the tools themselves.

1. June 20–23, 2016 | Berlin, Germany

2. Software-Defined Operations:
The UNIFY SP-DevOps Toolkit
Catalin Meirosu, Ericsson Research

3. The EU FP7 UNIFY project in a nutshell
• Research towards increasing the velocity of
telecom service introduction across
transport networks and cloud
• In SP-DevOps Workpackage, design novel
observability and verification features
• Contributors to this talk:
• Wolfgang John (Ericsson)
• Pontus Sköldström and Bertrand Pechenot
(ACREO Swedish ICT)
• Per Kreuger and Rebecca Steinert
(SICS Swedish ICT)
• Riccardo Sisto, Guido Marchetto,
Serena Spinoso, Matteo Virgilio
(Politecnico di Torino),
• Felicián Németh and István Pelle
(Budapest Technical University)
Major Vendors:
SMEs:
Universities:
Research Institutes:
Major Service Providers:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013
in the UNIFY project, grant agreement no. 619609. The views expressed here are those of the authors only.
The European Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information in this document

4. A view on DevOps principles
DevOps #3
Deploy with
reliable
processes
DevOps #1
Monitor and
Validate
operational
quality
DevOps #2
Develop and
Test against
production-
like systems
DevOps #4
Amplify
feedback
loops
Tools
APIs
Processes
Automation
Tools
Accessibility
Common tools and vocabulary
Source of formal DevOps principles: IBM DevOps for Dummies

5. verification
troubleshooting
observability
achieve five 9s
Service Provider requirements for DevOps
• increased network stability
• optimize for larger transmission delays
• scalability to millions+ sessions with less hardware
• adapt to diversity of resource programmability
• extend existing procedures to new resource and
service classes
• common APIs for workflow orchestration and
automation
adapted from draft-unify-nfvrg-devops-02

6. UNIFY SP-DevOps Results
Deploy
SERVICE DEVELOPER
VNF DEVELOPER
OPERATOR
IPTVQuality
Monitor
Path Verification
Infrastructure & VNF
Monitoring and Verification
Data
Distribution
Automated
Troubleshooting
Programmability
of ObservabilityService Verification

7. UNIFY SP-DevOps Toolkit Components
Deploy
SERVICE DEVELOPER
VNF DEVELOPER
OPERATOR
IPTVQuality
Monitor
Path Verification

8. The UNIFY SP-DevOps Toolkit
• Is
• Inspiration for the telecom DevOps community for new features
• A collection of research results released under individual licenses
• Provided as-is, with no guarantees
• Supported by the respective authors best efforts
• Is not
• Production-ready
• Optimized for all potential use cases

9. DoubleDecker: a message bus for all
• Scalable communication services for
monitoring functions and/or VNFs
• IP (unicast, multicast) and IPC transport
• Pub-sub and direct communication pattern
• Extends ZeroMQ with
• Client and broker hierarchy with heartbeat
• Simple routing mechanism
• Isolation mechanism for multi-tenancy with
built-in encryption key management
• https://github.com/acreo/doubledecker
VES

10. EPOXIDE: debug with Emacs
• Troubleshooting framework integrating
other tools in TroubleShooting Graphs
(TSG)
• Based on EMACS
• Nodes and links of TSG are shown in
buffers
• semantic navigation
• navigation in a visualized TSG
• Event driven framework
• API for third-party tool developers
• http://github.com/nemethf/epoxide
Pinpoint Doctor

11. RateMon: instant congestion prediction
• Scalable congestion detector based on
reading switch port utilization counters
• Uses first and second statistical moments
for link utilization
• transmits only the estimate to the controller,
instead of high-speed data flow
• 1-minute prediction with message rate
3000x lower than raw SNMP counters
• https://github.com/nigsics/ramon.git
Software Fastpath Service Quality Metrics
Prediction

12. VeriGraph: fast pre-deployment verification
• Check properties of deployment models
(currently, using UNIFY VNFFG format)
• Topological reachability
• Isolation
• Node traversal
• Based on the Z3 SMT solver, a formal
methods satisfiability tool
• https://github.com/netgroup-polito/verigraph
P
PRIVATE NETWORK INTERNET
Mail Client
Web Client
Web Server
Mail Server
CHAIN 1
CHAIN 2
Anti Spam
NAT
ACL firewall
Web Cache
1.56 seconds
Copper Parser PolicyTest

13. Conclusion
• Improved observability, accessibility and verification
features are key for telecom DevOps
• The UNIFY SP-DevOps Toolkit includes several
results that could contribute towards OPNFV
activities

14. More information
• “DevOps for Service Providers – next generation tools”, Ericsson Research blog
• FP7 UNIFY Project Results: SP-DevOps Toolkit description on the project site
• FP7 UNIFY D4.3, via the project results webpage