Change Management Extensions

For Casablance release, we propose the following functionalities.

1)      Flexible workflow designer and orchestrator  COMMITTED

1. Impacted components: SDC, SO, and VID (nice-to-have)
2. Contributors: AT&T, Amdocs, Huawei (?)
3. Functionalities

1. 1. Catalog in SDC for meta-data about the building blocks – completed by Amdocs
   2. Designer/editor in SDC for creating workflow – committed to develop by Amdocs
   3. Convert already existing building blocks/activities to be workflow designer ready
   4. Move workflow out of service model to independent artifact – priority nice to have
   5. Distribution of workflow to SO – preferably with workflow as independent artifact
   6. Deployment of workflow in SO
   7. User interface (VID) to select workflow and input parameters for execution
   8. Execute workflow in SO
   9. Rainy day handling for unsuccessful workflow steps
   10. Visualize the execution results on VID dashboard
   11. Ability to cancel workflow execution (VID)

Flow Designer Orchestration High Level Diagram

Run-time support of User Designed Workflows

2)      Traffic migration building block COMMITTED

1. Impacted components: SDNC, APPC, VFC, SO
2. Contributors: AT&T, Orange, Intel
3. Functionalities
   1. Common API definition for traffic migration
      1. Source, destination nodes - pool
      2. Flow distribution policy - equal distribution for e.g.
      3. Anchor points - e.g., DNS for layer-4+ VNFs
      4. Fine-grained flow filter
      5. Failure handler
   2. Mechanisms for traffic migration - implemented by controller
      1. Assessment report on commonalities/differences across VNF types – e.g., IP based redirection, DNS based or load balancer
4. Integration/testing
   
   1. Use case across different VNF types – vGW/vCPE, vFW, vLB, vDNS
   2. Develop recipe (using Ansible, NETCONF or REST) for traffic migration depending on the protocol used to communicate with the VNF 

3)      5G RAN PNF Software upgrade

1. Impacted components: APPC, SO, SDC, A&AI, Ansible/EM
2. Contributors: AT&T, China Mobile, Huawei
3. Functionalities
   1. Leverage in-place software upgrade Beijing use case to demonstrate application to 5G RAN PNFs
   2. Health check (pre/post)
   3. Software download, installation and activation
   4. Roll-back for unsuccessful execution
   5. Manual processing / intervention for failures/roll-back issues

4) Change Management Scheduler COMMITTED

1. Impacted components: OOF
2. Contributors: AT&T
3. Functionalities
   
   1. Discover schedule based on the change management constraints
   2. Constraints
      
      1. Time-based - e.g., execute the change activity during the maintenance window and weekdays
      2. Concurrency of how many NF instances to change at a time - this is concurrency within a single user request
      3. NF conflicts (if time permits) - avoid work scheduled at the same time on the same NF instance
   3. Input
      
      1. List of NF instances - request details as depicted in the Beijing script
      2. Start/end times
      3. Expected duration
      4. Constraint/policy
      5. Type of change (workflow name)
      6. Concurrency value
   4. Output
      
      1. Schedule - time and instance at which the workflow would be executed

4. Integration/Testing plan

   1. Use Beijing vGW in-place software upgrade to demo execution based on the schedule output by OOF