SONATA presents the First operational Release of its Service Platform

SONATA has just submitted a new deliverable, D4.2 Service Platform First Operational Release and Documentation.

5G is posing significant technical and non-technical challenges to our society. The SONATA NFV project has chosen, among others, the flexible programmability of 5G networks, by providing Communication Service Providers a Service Platform that can accommodate their needs in this new and much more challenging (5G) environment. This platform must be highly flexible, to be able to be adapted to different markets and segments and support new and unforeseen services, but secure, so that only authorised people can change the platform’s behaviour in a controlled way. Higher flexibility comes from the capability to extend the platform, in a microservice-oriented architecture, and security is achieved by using a gatekeeper supporting the authentication and authorisation burden, out of the main service deployment loop. Short times to deploy new or updated services, as well as providing adequate mechanisms and environments for testing these new or updated services also support the platform’s needed flexibility.

These mechanisms described in this deliverable, covering the work done from the previous deliverable (D4.1, Orchestrator Prototype) and the first year project review. As Agile Methodologies supporters, we are not designing everything up front, but opted to do it iteratively, together with some implementation, testing and deployment.

After having proved the whole concept in the first year, SONATA is now making the Service Platform more secure, with users having to register themselves and APIs accessing the platform by using HTTPS. SONATA is now able to control every service usage through a licensing mechanism, and collect KPIs on each API usage and performance. Functions can now have their Specific Managers (Services could already have these in the first year) changing the platform’s default behaviour in scaling and placement. These Specific Managers can be securely uploaded, having their interactions with the rest of the platform restricted to an adapter component name Executive Plugin.

SONATA is considering kind of Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM), based entirely on containers. This option will put to the test our Infrastructure Abstraction layer, which will have to support a different VIM from the ones more similar to OpenStack.

After this second year, developers will be able to ask the Service Platform for near real-time monitoring data about their services and functions. This mechanism is already designed, and is being implemented at the time of writing.

The DevOps approach in the development of the Service Platform itself will be enhanced, giving SONATA an edge over the different kinds of problems Developers will face when deploying services and functions using it.

Support for the expansion of the open-source community around the Service Platform implementation will also increase, by contributing to the social network channels the project has, and contributing to other projects of that community.

To read more, download the D4.2 here.

About SONATA
SONATA is developing a NFV framework that provides a programming model and development toolchain for virtualized services, fully integrated with a DevOps-enabled service platform and orchestration system. SONATA initial results include:

• SONATA’s Network Service SDK: Facilitates network service development for third-party developers
• SONATA’s Service platform: Thanks to the modular design of its MANO framework, the platform offers high customization opportunities for both, Communication Service Providers and Service Developers.
• SONATA NFV DevOps Workflow: The SONATA system is designed for agile development and operation of network services. It enables a DevOps workflow between the SDK tools and the service platform, which allows developers and operators to closely collaborate.