by Bartosz Michalik of Amartus
MEF is an industry body that, besides other activities, defines the LSO capabilities and APIs to automate the entire service lifecycle in a sustainable fashion. This activity will allow service providers to attain coordinated management and control across all network domains responsible for delivering end to end connectivity services. In order to enable that coordinated management and ensure efficient communication within networks, MEF has defined the reference architecture. In short, this architecture comprises functional blocks and 'LSO Reference Points'. Reference Points are the logical points of interaction between specific functional management components, such as business applications, service orchestration functions (SOF), or infrastructure management and control applications (ICM). The Presto Management Interface Reference Point is the 'north-south' interface for network resource provisioning that sits between the SOF and ICM, and according to MEF 55 (https://wiki.mef.net/display/CESG/LSO+Presto), it is "needed to manage the network infrastructure, including network and topology view related management functions".
Currently, the LSO Presto API efforts are spearheaded by CenturyLink, with active contributions from Amartus, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Infinera and NEC.
Industry-wide Collaboration Accelerates Realization of the Third Network Vision
Last year, MEF began the process of specifying the industry standard to accelerate the adoption of orchestrated network services. Enabling and assuring Third Network services across multiple provider networks calls for an industry-wide collaboration because of the involved level of complexity. In order to facilitate that cooperation and complement the work of its Technical and Operations Committee, MEF has come forward with a number of initiatives.
What emerged from that work was a plan to support and validate the work around MEF standards and LSO architecture by delivering open and close source reference implementations that realize the ideas defined in MEF 55 specification, outlining the LSO Reference Architecture and Framework. MEF has launched a series of initiatives that allow the in-network validation of Lifecycle Service Orchestration data models and interfaces. The current effort of the working groups is streamlined under the umbrella terms of Open Lifecycle Service Orchestration (OpenLSO) and Open Connectivity Services (OpenCS) ecosystems.
OpenLSO is focused on the implementation of functions and APIs specific for service orchestration functionality (SOF). It primarily targets service providers who are accelerating their adoption of LSO to enjoy all benefits of end to end service orchestration over standard MEF services. OpenCS focuses on Presto NRP, which is an LSO interface reference point (IRP) specific for infrastructure and control management (ICM). OpenCS provides reference implementations of connectivity services using combinations of open and close source software, open hardware, SDN, NFV and Carrier Ethernet (CE) 2.0-certified devices. To leverage these technologies, MEF develops this work stream in close cooperation with open source projects such as ON.Lab, OpenDaylight and OPNFV. This ecosystem should be of interest to those service providers that are adopting SDN and NFV to deliver MEF-defined connectivity services.
About the author
Bartosz Michalik is a Software Architect at Amartus, a Certified MEF Engineer, and a holder of the MEF Recognition Award for LSO Hackathon blogging and facilitation. He leads the LSO Presto Hackathon project, and co-leads the OpenCS Packet WAN project together with Donald Hunter from Cisco. He is also a contributor to the Open Daylight UniMgr project. E-mail me at a Bartosz.Michalik@amartus.com with any questions or queries.
(NB: Further information about MEF's Third Network Vision and Lifecycle Service Orchestration is available here: https://www.mef.net/third-network/lifecycle-service-orchestration)
