Re-evaluation

After writing this proposal it has turned out that designing control loops with DCAE-DS and distributing them to the run time has actually never worked. The reasoning below still stands except for its suitability for inclusion in El Alto. With current understanding enabling this needs major parts of new implementation from Self Serve Control Loops - deprecated that will get implemented only in Frankfurt. As part of that work this extension to integration test(s) still applies.

The Problem

Based on discussions in control loop subcommittee it seems that DCAE-DS related parts of design time are not included in any of the integration test cases. We have not been able to find any trace of such things in git repos either.

There are also some other related concern about the coverage of the current integration tests (https://lists.onap.org/g/onap-discuss/message/17112?p=,,,20,0,0,0::Created,,t.puha,20,2,0,31641098). After writing that email we have found that scaleout test case uses CLAMP and seems to instantiate a new TCA for the service. There is no sign of any automation though. No sign of CLAMP usage for vFWCL are visible in anything we have found (like likely candidates in Vetted vFirewall Demo - Full draft how-to for F2F and ReadTheDocs or vFWCL instantiation, testing, and debuging or integration git repos), but it seems to use the bootstrapped TCA instance and its hard-coded policy and just update its operational policy directly with a script.

For vFWCL this seems to mean the none of MicroServices Onboarding in ONAP flow is included. As a comparison, Scaleout case seems to miss essentially chapters "Onboarding" and "Template Creation"  which pretty much matches the scope of DCAE-DS related flow. The terminology in that page does not really match the terminology of SDC so it is not too easy to draw the exact line, but based on discussions it seems that the pre-prepared Blueprint is attached to the service directly. This means kind of jumping directly to the very last arrow of "Template creation" where the DCAE_template_1 is stored to SDC catalog. 

This means that all DCAE-DS functionality is outside of integration testing coverage. The reason why this cannot be fully covered in CSIT is that only when the produced model is used in run time components (CLAMP, DCAE, Policy) is the real correctness and compatibility with these other components verified.

The Proposal

Include the full flow of MicroServices Onboarding in ONAP to vFWCL integration test case. The biggest missing piece inside SDC/DCAE-DS is described in detail in How to Create a Service with a Monitoring Configuration using SDC. This is still not a complete description as it does not touch policy aspects. The CLAMP part is assumed to be similar to current scaleout case, but it would be automated. 

This extension of the test case does not need any new implementation to ONAP itself but only extension of the test. Thus it should be ok to do it already in El Alto as this is purely a quality improvement with no new functionality.

The point is to increase the testing coverage and automation level of the control loops at integration testing level. As such it would be almost as good to implement these enhancements to any other integration test case instead of vFWCL. As vFWCL is the simplest one and kind of a "smoke" case, increasing its coverage over longer piece of the full flow will be most beneficial. On the other hand, if vFWCL is intentionally left to work with pre-installed DCAE analytics and policies, then this enhancement belongs to some other test case. 

Samsung is willing to contribute bulk of this enhancement but some support will be needed.