Name of Use Case:      

ONAP Change Management

Use Case Authors:

AT&T

Description:

Change management (CM) activities usually constitute a significant chunk of Network Operations workload. From routine maintenance to new service upgrading with new features a lot of effort goes towards planned activities. Change related outages are also a leading cause of network downtime.  Automating and standardizing the change management process is something that all operation teams will expect from any automation platform. Also it offers significant opportunities for cost savings and can lead to higher network reliability.

The change management process can generally be split into 3 parts: Design, Scheduling and Execution, each needing functionality from multiple ONAP components, each with its own technical challenges that we would like to tackle as part of our ONAP framework. Because change management is more of an end to end function, we will try to address challenges as part of use case hopefully aiming at release 2. 

As a starting point we present a case for upgrading a vFW while in service, while trying to minimize customer impact. Ideally ONAP should allow Operation teams the ability to create/schedule/orchestrate changes across all VNF's/deployed services so we will be extremely interested n working with the vCPE and VoLTE use cases to define similar examples.

Sample vFW upgrade flow

Users and Benefit:

Service Provider Ops teams that spend significant time and effort on maintenance activities. 

Customers will benefit, due to the increased reliability in the network.

E2E type of use cases like change management can help ONAP to mature faster as a platform.

Sample flows:

Change Scheduling flow :

Project Impact:

SDC: Allow users to design change workflows

SO: Orchestrate the execution of changes

A&AI: Provide fields that mark resources being in maintenance.

DCAE: Provide statistics/analytics to verify service status before/after change

ONAP Optimization Framework: Allow for optimizations for change scheduling.

APP-C/VF-C/SDN-C: Control the VNF's/ network resources being changed.

Policy: Hold/Enforce change related policies.

VID: Provide UI for change execution

Work Commitment: