Support of VNF offered by PaaS service

Proposers

Gerardo Garcia (Telefonica)
Alfonso Tierno (Telefonica)
Francisco Javier Ramon (Telefonica)

Type

Feature

Target MDG/TF

IM, LCM and RO. It could also affect NBI, LW-UI and devops (osmclient).

Description

Most public clouds provide a PaaS facility to facilitate the instantiation of some complex IT applications, including some selected VNFs. In addition, some private clouds provide a PaaS service where some VNFs are offered as part of the catalogue of platforms to be deployed. This provides to the end user a high level interface to request a VNF instance with the only need of indicating a reduced set of parameters which control typically the size of the VNF and its configuration.

The objective of this feature is letting OSM leverage on this option in those cases when it is available in a specific cloud to facilitate instantiation processes, while the normal instantiation process remains available for the rest of the situations and keeps being mandatory for a well-formed package.

It is not the intention to substitute the PaaS functionality of public or private clouds, but to provide a generic framework to instantiate VNFs through a PaaS service in those cases where the cloud is offering that service.

Alike the rest of OSM operations, this process should be descriptor/package-driven, so that all the necessary information to instantiate the VNF should be included in the descriptor, potentially complemented with instantiation parameters.

This case could be treated similarly to the feature allowing alternative images, where the descriptors allow the inclusion of alternative image references, different to the default one, for particular target environments. In a similar way, for this feature the VNF Package would specify that, for particular target environments, the built-in PaaS would be a preferred mean of deployment.

In addition, OSM should also be provided of sufficient information to run the PaaS calls appropriately.

Demo or definition of done

Create a VNFD with a VDU that has, besides the traditional fields, includes specific fields for a particular target PaaS service.
Create a NSD that includes the VNF above.
Create instances of the NS in 2 different target environments (any common VIM and a target offering a PaaS service)
Check that both of them work properly.