CLAMP Project Proposal (5/11/17)

Project Name:

• Proposed name for the project: CLAMP
• Proposed name for the repository: clamp

Project description:

CLAMP is a platform for designing and managing control loops.  It is used to design a closed loop, configure it with specific parameters for a particular network service, then deploying and undeploying it.  Once deployed, the user can also update the loop with new parameters during runtime, as well as suspending and restarting it.

It interacts with other systems to deploy and execute the closed loop.  For example, it pushes the control loop design to the SDC catalog, associating it with the VF resource.  It requests from DCAE the instantiation of microservices to manage the closed loop flow.  Further, it creates and updates multiple policies in the Policy Engine that define the closed loop flow.  

The OpenCLAMP platform abstracts the details of these systems under the concept of a control loop model.  The design of a control loop and its management is represented by a workflow in which all relevant system interactions take place.  This is essential for a self-service model of creating and managing control loops, where no low-level user interaction with other components is required.

At a higher level, CLAMP is about supporting and managing the broad operational life cycle of VNFs/VMs and ultimately ONAP components itself. It will offer the ability to design, test, deploy and update control loop automation - both closed and open. Automating these functions would represent a significant saving on operational costs compared to traditional methods.

Scope

Functionality supported by a Control Loop:

   A control loop does several functions:

1. Collect data about VNFs or VNF infrastructure; both fault and performance metrics
2. Use analytics to do:
   1.  root-cause analysis on faults
   2. threshold of performance metrics
   3. determining signatures of network conditions
   4. ...
3. For open loop, send message describing condition to ticketing system for human intervention
4. For closed loop, execute one of many actions to remediate the network condition
   1. restart vm
   2. rebuilt vm
   3. migrate vm
   4. scale up/down resources
   5. redirect traffic
   6. ...
5. For closed loop, detect that a network condition has been corrected through our actions

CLAMP Functions on Control Loop:

1. Designing the Control Loop:
   1. Model based (based on templates)
   2. Re-usable designs
   3. Choose from different analytics microservices to include in control loop (for instance, Threshold Crossing (TCA), String Matching, or Holmes (fault correlation))
2. Configuring the Control Loop:
   1. VNF driven, future should be SERVICE driven
   2. Defining threshold values…
3. Deploying the Control Loop:
   1. Sending template towards DCAE, Policy, …
4. Lifecycle Management of the Control Loop:
1. Stopping/re-starting/updating
2. Monitoring (visualization of the Loop)(future not in R1)
3. Trial mode, production mode, ….(future not in R1)
4. Activation (manually and/or triggered by a policy(future not in R1) and/or tied to the vnf startup(future not in R1))

End to End Flows:

Since CLAMP is an end-to-end application, the project will, early on, develop documents describing detailed call-flows and message formats between ONAP components to support

control loop. 

These documents will be developed for the three use cases: vFW/vDNS, vVoLTE, and vCPE.  See description of vVoLTE use-case at the bottom of the page.

Here below you can find a diagram showing, generically, how a "runtime control loop flow" looks like:

Seed Code:

CLAMP will be based on seed code implementing the design tool and cockpit.

The current functionality of the CLAMP tool includes:

Design

• A set number of templates to define resources that are created and configured as part of a specific control loop.

• Interaction with Policy through APIs: Configuration of policies that define the control loop, directly from the CLAMP tool.
• Interaction with ASDC through APIs to push a fully configured control loop and distribute it to DCAE [represented as TOSCA template]

Runtime

• Interaction with DCAE and Policy through APIs: Life-cycle management of the control loop: deploy, stop, start, undeploy, update configurations

The rich functionality already available in CLAMP will put us in a good position

to implement the ONAP use cases, as described next.

Use-cases - Release 1 content :

Using existing seed code, CLAMP will support the vFW/vDNS ONAP Use case in R1. 

      vFW Control Loop design will consist of:

• 1. create the blueprint for DCAE to capture traffic level .
  2. create the policy that will define theshold signature that DCAE will use.
     1. DCAE team provides model to Policy team to built the Configuration policy
  3. create the policy that will trigger traffic gen to lower traffic.

      vDNS Control Loop design will consist of:

• 1. create the blueprint for DCAE to capture traffic level.
  2. create the policy that will define theshold signature that DCAE will use.
     1. DCAE team provides model to Policy team to built the Configuration policy
  3. create the policy that will trigger SO to spun up a new vDNS vm.

For the vVoLTE and vCPE use-cases, CLAMP plans to support them, but we need more clarifications on those use-cases in order to know the features CLAMP will be able to implement, to support those two use-cases, in R1.

We have developed call flows to describe how these use-cases will be implemented, and require input from other teams.  Below see the vVoLTE Call flows.

CLAMP ONAP vVoLTE Use Case.docx

Interfaces:

The following interfaces will be implemented by other components but used for CLAMP.  Therefore, CLAMP has these as dependencies:

• Query and update services in SDC
• Query and update control loop templates in SDC (future not in R1)
• Policy interfaces for creating/updating configuration and operational policies
• DCAE interfaces for deploying/undeploying control loops
• Runtime messaging interface between DCAE and Policy

Architecture Alignment

• Below we show how the CLAMP application fits into ONAP.  The red figure below shows the CLAMP application components.  There is a design portion and an operations component, which are both deployed within ONAP portal.

*Link to TSC approval: 
Link to approval of additional submitters: 

Associated files

CLAMP Closed Loop for ONAP vCPE Use Case Release 1:

CLAMP Closed Loop for ONAP vVoLTE Use Case, Release 1: