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 as changes are made within the cloud. A&AI is metadata-driven, allowing new inventory item types to be added dynamically and quickly with Service Design and Creation (SDC) 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 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. 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.
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Active and Available Inventory (A&AI) is the ECOMP component that provides real-time views of D2 Resources, Services, Products, and Customer Subscriptions for D2 services. Figure 12 provides a functional view of A&AI. The views provided by Active and Available Inventory relate data managed by multiple ECOMP, BSS, OSS, and network applications to form a “top to bottom” view ranging from the Products customers buy to the Services and Resources used to compose the Products. Active and Available Inventory not only forms a registry of Products, Services, and Resources, it also maintains up-to-date views of the relationships between these inventory items across their lifecycles. To deliver the vision of the dynamism of D2, Active and Available Inventory will manage these multi-dimensional relationships in real-time.
Active and Available Inventory maintains real-time Inventory and Topology data by being continually updated as changes are made within the AT&T Integrated Cloud. It uses graph data technology to store relationships between inventory items. Graph traversals can then be used to identify chains of dependencies between items. A&AI data views are used by homing logic during real-time service delivery, root cause analysis of problems, impact analysis, capacity management, software license management and many other D2 functions.
The Inventory and Topology data includes resources, service, products, and customer subscriptions, along with topological relationships between them. 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. A&AI is metadata driven, allowing new inventory item types to be added dynamically and quickly via AT&T Service Design & Creation (ASDC) catalog definitions, reducing the need for lengthy development cycles
The following list provides A&AI key requirements.
x Provide accurate and timely views of Resource, Service, and Product Inventory and their relationship to the customer’s subscription.
x Deliver topologies and graphs.
x Maintain relationships to other key entities (e.g., location) as well as non-D2 inventory.
x Maintain the state of active, available and assigned inventory within ECOMP
x Allow introduction of new types of Resources, Services, and Products without a software development cycle (i.e., be metadata driven).
x Be easily accessible and consumable by internal and external clients.
x Provide functional APIs that expose invariant services and models to clients
x Provide highly available and reliable functions and APIs capable of operating as generic cloud workloads that can be placed arbitrarily within the AT&T AIC cloud infrastructure capable of supporting those workloads
x Scale incrementally as ECOMP volumes and AIC Infrastructure scales
x Perform to the requirements of clients, with quick response times and high throughput
x Enable vendor product and technology swap-outs over time, e.g., migration to a new technology for data storage or migration to a
new vendor for MSO (Master Service Orchestrator) or Controllers.
x Enable dynamic placement functions to determine which workloads are assigned to specific ECOMP components (i.e., Controllers or VNFs) for optimal performance and utilization efficiency.
x Identify the controllers to be used for any particular request.
A&AI Functionality
A&AI functionality includes Inventory and Topology Management, Administration, and Reporting & Notification.
Inventory and Topology Management
A&AI federates inventory using a central registry to create the global view of D2 inventory and topology. A&AI receives updates from the various inventory masters distributed throughout the D2 infrastructure, and persists just enough to maintain the global view. As transactions occur within D2, A&AI persists asset attributes and relationships into the federated view based on configurable metadata definitions for each activity that determine what is relevant to the A&AI inventory. A&AI 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 A&AI global view of relationships is necessary for forming aggregate views of detailed inventory across the distributed master data sources within D2.
Administration
A&AI also performs a number of administrative functions. Given the model driven basis of ECOMP, metadata models for the various catalog items are stored, updated, applied and versioned dynamically as needed without taking the system down for maintenance. Given the distributed nature of A&AI as well as the relationships with other ECOMP components, audits are periodically run to assure that A&AI is in sync with the inventory masters such as controllers and MSO. Adapters allow A&AI to interoperate with non-D2 systems as well as 3rd party cloud providers via evolving cloud standards.
Reporting and Notification
Consistent with other ECOMP applications, A&AI produces canned and ad-hoc reports, integrates with the ECOMP dashboards, publishes notifications other ECOMP components can subscribe to, and performs logging consistent with configurable framework constraints.