Active and Available Inventory (A&AI) is the OpenECOMP subsystem that provides real-time views of available Resources, Services, Products, Offers, and their relationships. A&AI not only forms a registry of assets, it also maintains up-to-date views of the relationships between these inventory items, including their relevance to different components of OpenECOMP.
A&AI is continually updated in real-time by as changes are made within the cloud. A&AI is metadata-driven, allowing new inventory item types to be added dynamically and quickly with ASDC catalog definitions, eliminating the need for lengthy development cycles.
The A&AI subsystem uses graph data technology to store relationships between inventory items. Graph traversals can then be used to identify chains of dependencies between items. Relationships captured by A&AI include “top to bottom” relationships such as those defined in ASDC when products are composed of services, and services are composed of resources. It also includes “side to side” relationships such as end to end connectivity of virtualized functions to form service chains. A&AI also keeps track of the span of control of each controller, and is queried by MSO and placement functions to identify which controller to invoke to perform a given operation.