Service assurance is a critical part of operationalising NFV/SDN-based networks

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1 About Analysys Mason 1 Service assurance is a critical part of operationalising NFV/SDN-based networks May 2016 Anil Rao CSPs are actively engaged in developing operational architectures for network functions virtualisation/softwaredefined networking (NFV/SDN). While NFV management and network orchestration (MANO) has received most attention to date, other important functions such as service design and service assurance (SA) are now coming to the fore. This research note discusses the characteristics of the new SA and why it will be a crucial component in operationalising NFV/SDN. The industry is gradually moving towards operationalising NFV/SDN Communication service providers (CSPs) and vendors are now actively engaging in initiatives to operationalise NFV/SDNs, after years of developing and proving the network virtualisation technologies. However, most industry stakeholders admit that the biggest challenge to success in the operationalisation phase is the need to finalise a reference architecture for the management and network orchestration of the NFV domain (MANO), as well as the end-to-end service creation and management process for the hybrid network. This new architecture must support high levels of automation of key business processes such as order-to-cash, plan-to-provision and trouble-to-resolve. Various stakeholders are working to address these challenges: Industry initiatives Approaches to virtualisation remain fragmented, despite the collaboration and convergence efforts of ETSI, OPNFV, TM Forum and others particularly with regard to integration of MANO with OSS and BSS. Given the number of CSPs that have made progress on NFV deployments, it is now critical for the industry to tackle specification of the ETSI NFV MANO and its integration with the rest of the OSS/BSS, in order to realise the promised benefits of NFV/SDN automation. ETSI MANO functionality is deep, but narrow compared to the vngn-oss architecture needed for complete NFV/SDN deployments. 1 CSP initiatives Three prominent CSPs AT&T, Verizon and Telefónica, working within ETSI, have each released details of their approaches for operationalising NFV/SDN. 2 AT&T has revealed the structure and philosophy behind ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy), its Domain 2.0 software platform for cloud computing and network virtualisation Verizon has released an NFV/SDN reference architecture manifesto, which includes its End to End Orchestrator (EEO), a subsystem that extends the concepts of NFV orchestration to support orchestration of SDN services (transport/wan/enterprise) and end-to-end network services 1 Refer to Analysys Mason s report: vngn-oss: An architectural framework for virtual network management and orchestration. 2 Refer to Analysys Mason s report: NFV MANO platforms multiply, while service orchestration remains ill-defined.

2 Service assurance is a critical part of operationalising NFV/SDN-based networks 2 Telefónica s OpenMANO initiative has become a broader ETSI initiative, Open Source MANO (OSM), whose goal is to accelerate [industry] convergence on a telco-ready, production-quality virtualised infrastructure management (VIM)-independent MANO stack. Vendor initiatives Vendors which aspire to be virtualisation leaders are integrating virtualisation products into platforms, starting to allow for multi-vendor operation, providing links to existing OSS and BSS, and offering virtualisation-related professional services. Vendor ecosystems are emerging, mostly led by large vendors, bringing together diverse industry stakeholders such as CSPs, independent software vendors, network equipment manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers and system integrators. For example, Intel's Network Builders program, one of the first ecosystems in the industry, has gone from enabling interoperability testing and initiating contact between vendors, system integrators and end-users, to pre-testing full end-to-end solutions and initiating deployment of these pre-tested solutions. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise s (HPE s) OpenNFV proposes an integrated virtualisation platform supported by professional services. Meanwhile, Nokia has incorporated Alcatel-Lucent s CloudBand and Network Services Platform (NSP) into its broader telco cloud infrastructure framework. Other vendors in the fray are Amdocs, Cisco, Ciena, Ericsson, Huawei and NEC/Netcracker, which not only aspire to sell their products and professional services to CSPs, but also act as an alternative channel for smaller vendors. Through their ecosystems and labs, these companies offer on-boarding of partner virtual network functions (VNFs) to bring proven interoperable solutions with multi-vendor support. What is clearly emerging from the various initiatives is the recognition that, to achieve service agility in virtualised networks, CSPs must incorporate DevOps and Agile methodologies such as continuous integration and continuous deployment into their service design, deployment and operations. These methodologies are expected to usher in service-oriented software design principles to telecoms services, as well as encourage vendors to build software products that are highly modular, loosely coupled and open. Current approaches to SA are unsuitable to support the future mode of operations SA is an afterthought in the current mode of operations SA has lagged behind other NFV-related OSS developments such as network orchestration. There are two main reasons for the inertia around SA. The first and most obvious reason is that the industry so far has mainly focused on virtualisation of network components, and, to a lesser extent, on orchestration of the virtual network resources. The second reason is the larger issue that has plagued SA for years: CSPs do not prioritise investments in SA technology. Chronologically, CSPs first invest in the network build-out, then in network management systems and service fulfilment, charging and billing, and finally in SA, just in time for handover to network operations. SA must become an integral part of business processes, right from the start When operationalised, NFV/SDN aims to bring a paradigm shift to the prevalent operational model. In the proposed mode of operations based on DevOps, CSPs will take a service-led top-down approach, by moulding and configuring the network to the service requirements, instead of the other way round. It is likely that CSPs will use an integrated design and deployment environment to design, build, test and deploy their services, and make a seamless handover to operations. In this operational model, various CSP activities and processes such as service design, network planning and engineering, network and IT operations and service operations must collaborate in parallel to design, deliver and manage new services, rather than working in sequential silos with little interaction.

3 Service assurance is a critical part of operationalising NFV/SDN-based networks 3 It is clear that in virtualised/hybrid network operations environments, CSP business processes such as order-tocash, plan-to-provision and trouble-to-resolve will need to evolve and adapt to the DevOps model. We expect SA to play a critical role in the full service lifecycle by becoming an integral component of these business processes, and force new thinking among CSPs and SA vendors about how assurance software is designed, used and integrated with adjacent systems. SA must integrate with orchestration and other adjacent systems to drive process automation SA systems must support open APIs to enable microservices-based architecture Traditionally, assurance systems have primarily focused on monitoring the health of network infrastructure, performing pre-launch service activation tests, reporting threshold breaches to network operations via dashboards, and triggering operations engineers to take remedial actions. Due to the nature of intended usage of the systems, assurance software has been designed as closed systems that require custom development and proprietary integrations with other adjacent systems, such as higher-order assurance systems (e.g. service management systems) and trouble ticketing systems. However, this has resulted in unintended consequences such as exacerbating the issue of siloed deployments (because the costs of systems integration are prohibitive), the absence of an end-to-end view of customer s quality of experience, and a lack of process automation. CSPs and vendors are now realising that software systems which are closed and hard to integrate are unsustainable in virtualised environments. SA must evolve to become open systems that support cloud APIs such as REST and SOAP, and enable easier integration with other adjacent systems such as network orchestration and service orchestration/fulfilment systems. Open APIs are one of the principles underpinning the microservices architecture, which lies at the heart of the operations of some top Internet and web-scale companies and is attracting significant interest in telecoms, in the context of NFV. Microservices architecture espouses loosely coupled systems (services) with open APIs for easy integration, and enables high levels of process automation. Integrating SA with orchestration enables dynamic control and flexibility In most CSP environments, the siloed deployments and high integration tax mean that service fulfilment and service assurance systems are not integrated, and this creates fragmented business processes that often require significant manual intervention. Assurance systems such as active probes are manually provisioned and configured to test the service before launch. Similar manual provisioning processes are required for other assurance systems, to monitor the service post-launch. In NFV environments, this problem can be addressed by integrating SA with orchestration service orchestration/fulfilment and NFV orchestration (NFVO) to drive semi- or fully-automated provisioning processes. This can benefit CSPs on at least three fronts during the orderto-cash process: After the service is provisioned and before making it available to the enterprise customer, the network engineers ensure service readiness by performing a series of manual and time-consuming service-activation tests using active probe-based test agents. By integrating virtual probe-based test agents with orchestration, CSPs can automate service activation testing by configuring the probes at relevant points in the network and generating test traffic which can in turn be monitored for performance issues To further automate the process, the orchestrator can provision the most relevant test cases associated with the new service onto the active test infrastructure for activation testing, ongoing assurance, as well as policy-driven troubleshooting After the service is activated, the network and service data can be automatically synchronised onto a performance monitoring system using REST APIs. At this point, the performance monitoring system starts

4 Service assurance is a critical part of operationalising NFV/SDN-based networks 4 monitoring and reporting the performance of various KPIs such as interface availability, traffic to and from site, frame-delay and dropped packets. Other relevant use cases that could be supported by an orchestrated assurance solution include: just-in-time capacity augmentation of VNFs, customer experience and financial KPI-based assurance, and security analytics (for intrusion detection and distributed denial of service). In NFV environments, CSPs intend to give customers more control, allowing them to order a new service or reconfigure an existing service in near real time. SA systems must therefore be capable of continuously testing and monitoring the services that are constantly modified by customers to suit their changing needs. Other key requirements for SA in NFV/SDN environments SA must provide unified monitoring for the physical and virtual network, and assure services delivered over the hybrid network The network virtualisation evolution will be gradual and is expected to last for a considerable time (at least ten years). During this evolution, the physical network and the new virtual network functions will co-exist. New services will therefore be designed and delivered over these hybrid networks during this period of network coexistence. In their current form, most telecoms-focused SA solutions do not support the new virtual infrastructure technology or the hybrid environments. Consequently, SA software must evolve and adapt to accommodate the new virtual network elements, and the end-to-end hybrid network. Root cause analysis (RCA) functionality needs to be rethought The introduction of NFV/SDN creates the need for RCA that covers both the physical and virtual network domains. Supported by a common network data and service model, the new RCA function will need to gather events from the NFV infrastructure (NFVI) layer and the management layers VIM, SDN controllers (SDN-C), VNF manager (VNFM) and NFV orchestrator (NFVO) in the NFV domain and the physical network. Policy-enabled 3 assurance can help develop confidence in automation The biggest inhibitor to full automation is the gap in trust that exists among CSP departments. Network engineers and operational support staff are used to being in control of network configuration changes, and the tools used to apply those changes. To help build confidence among CSP staff, automation initiatives are expected to be introduced gradually. However, developing a robust policy-rules engine and integrating it with SA can help to accelerate some of the initiatives. Policy-enabled guided automation (open loop automation) with key decision points in the workflow would provide a significant step towards full closed-loop automation. Network analytics-driven assurance can significantly reduce the time to action Analytics-driven assurance enables CSPs to make operational processes more efficient, and provides a foundational capability for process automation. We expect the processing latency and time to action for some of the critical network configuration and optimisation use cases in NFV environments to be less than 60 seconds. By applying advanced capabilities such as machine learning and predictive analytics, CSPs can increase responsiveness and operational agility, reduce opex and improve the quality of business processes. 3 Policy in the context of service assurance refers to a set of rules that can automatically trigger troubleshooting routines. It doesn t refer to PCRF functionality.

5 Service assurance is a critical part of operationalising NFV/SDN-based networks 5 Conclusions As the industry takes steps towards operationalising NFV/SDN, all stakeholders accept the need for a DevOps model that espouses continuous integration and deployment for services. Enabled by microservices and open API software architectures, this new operational model will enable CSPs to truly harness the benefits of service agility and flexibility. To make these benefits a reality, OSS systems such as service assurance must support open APIs and integrate with adjacent systems such as NFV orchestration, inventory systems and service orchestration/fulfilment systems. This will enable dynamic control of the assurance components, and provide an important foundation for SA to participate in key business processes such as order-tocash, plan-to-provision and trouble-to-resolve right from the start. Policy- and analytics-enabled assurance can provide significant thrust to CSP efforts to realise automated operations. To support services that are delivered over a hybrid physical and virtual network, SA must provide end-to-end monitoring and assurance. (Figure 1) Figure 1: Service assurance in NFV/SDN based networks [Source: Analysys Mason, 2016]

6 About the author Anil Rao (Senior Analyst) is a member of Analysys Mason s Telecoms Software research team, and is the lead analyst for the Service Assurance programme, focusing on producing market share, forecast and research collateral for the programme. He has published research on assurance requirement for NFV/SDN, IP probes, real-time network analytics and the importance of service assurance in reducing churn and improving customer experience. Anil holds a BEng in Computer Science from the University of Mysore and an MBA from Lancaster University Management School, UK.

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