Active and Available Inventory (AAI) 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 active, available, and assigned assets, it also maintains up-to-date views of the multidimensional relationships among these assets, including their relevance to different components of OpenECOMP.
In addition to inventory and topology management, AAI provides inventory administration, reporting and notification. Data in AAI is continually updated in real-time as changes are made within the cloud. Because AAI is metadata-driven, new inventory item types can be added dynamically and quickly with Service Design and Creation (SDC) catalog definitions, eliminating the need for lengthy development cycles.
The AAI 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 AAI include “top to bottom” relationships such as those defined in SDC 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. AAI 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.
AAI data views can be used by homing logic during real-time service delivery, root cause analysis of problems, impact analysis, capacity management, software license management and many other functions.
An API enables queries to AAI from clients, and two user interfaces provide visual access to inventory details and data integrity statistics.
Figure 1 provides a functional view of AAI.
Inventory and topology management
AAI federates inventory using a central registry to create a global view of inventory and network topology. AAI receives updates from various inventory masters distributed throughout the OpenECOMP infrastructure, and persists just enough to maintain the global view. As transactions occur, AAI persists asset attributes and relationships into the federated view based on configurable metadata definitions for each activity that determine what is relevant to the AAI inventory. AAI provides standard APIs to enable queries from various clients regarding inventory and topology. Queries can be supported for a specific asset or a collection of assets. The AAI global view of relationships is necessary for forming aggregate views of detailed inventory across the distributed master data sources within D2. <<something must be substituted here for "D2" or this removed–see comment>>
Administration
AAI also performs a number of administrative functions. Metadata models for the various assets are stored, updated, applied and versioned dynamically as needed without requiring a system shutdown for maintenance. Given the distributed nature of AAI as well as the relationships with other OpenECOMP components, audits are periodically run to assure that AAI is in sync with the inventory masters such as controllers and MSO. Adapters allow AAI to interoperate with non-D2 systems as well as 3rd party cloud providers via evolving cloud standards. <<something must be substituted here for "D2" or this removed-see comment>>
Reporting and notification
Consistent with other OpenECOMP applications, AAI produces canned and ad-hoc reports, integrates with the OpenECOMP dashboards, publishes notifications that other OpenECOMP components can subscribe to, and performs logging that is consistent with configurable framework constraints.
Accessing AAI data
Two separate user interfaces, accessed from the OpenECOMP Portal, provide inventory information:
- AAI UI: Provides details about specific service instances. Users can search by attribute name or ID, view a visual representation of the service hierarchy and related nodes, and view specific details of a node.
- Data Integrity UI: Provides information about the quality and validity inventory data. This information can be provided for a specific time period, or for specific object types or dates.
In addition, AAI data is provided to the Topology Viewer of the OpenECOMP Portal, enabling a layered, graphical view of the virtual cloud network.