Overview

SDC is a Design platform, as such, we want to create an easy way to add new design capabilities to SDC.

In SDC design capabilities are provided by the main design tools, onboarding (VNF design), VF design/import and the service design. In addition to the main designee capabilities, SDC also provides the DCAE-DS blueprint design studio.

At the present, SDC does not have a standard for adding new designers. because of this, any new integration requires the SDC team to create a specific logic in the SDC code base to support such an integration.

The code changes needed are usefully in the UI since up until now we had to create a designer specific logic to support the integration

Solution concept

 We want to create a way where the integration of a new designer is seamless from the SDC perspective, we want to create a generic why where we can onboard new designers without needing to add specific code.

The solution will provide several options for showing the designer as part of SDC. The communication between the SDC and the designers on the UI side will be event based and on the back-end side it will be based on the external API’s SDC exposes.

Designer Availability

As part of the integration between SDC and the different plugins, we uphold the concept that SDC can function without any of the different plugins.

The designers enhance the capabilities of SDC they do not prohibit the SDC core functionality.

As a result, we want to create a mechanize that is configured based to decide what designers are shown in the SDC.

Solution

The availability will be based on a REST head call to the plugin UI server to check the availability of the server.

If the server response successfully a relevant flag will be updated to true and the plugin info will be returned in the response if not the flag will be set to false.

The SDC UI will execute the call on UI bootstrap. The mechanize will not support automatic refreshed as such, to update the UI with a new designer or to pick up a designer’s new state the user will need to refresh.

High-level overview

The solution will position SDC as a hosting application providing a platform for plugins to enhance the existing capabilities. Each plugin will be treated as a separate service in the eyes of SDC. From the SDC perspective, the plugin can be position anywhere. Because SDC is a multi-tier application we expect the different plugins to uphold the same architecture. There should be a separation between the FE server which is in the DMZ and serves UI pages to the BE server which is in the Protected network, that handles the DB access and the Businesses logic operations. The designer service is loosely integrated with SDC. The two integration points are the plugin  UI server location, which is configurable in the FE server configuration and a rest based communication between the plugins backend and SDC backend.

Flow diagram fix

...

TBD

The diagram describes the discovery process from the point when a user access SDC.

...

Rest endpoint

Request (GET)

...

Version change even example

...

Security TBD

Need to add solution for the iframe authorization and authentication.

...