Software‐defined operations

摘要

The information and communications technologies (ICT) industry made significant steps towards higher efficiency through automation over the last decade. Still, carrier network operations are catching up with other ICT sectors. In this Special Issue, we use the term software-defined operations to refer to approaches that aim to further simplify and automate the daily ICT infrastructure run time and at the same time increasing reliability and enhancing visibility into the state of the system. While traditional observability methods focused on metrics such as delay, loss, or CPU utilization, enhancing the visibility includes exposing internal telemetry data such as buffer occupancy for switch chips and cache miss ratios for multi-core processors, as well as allowing to define aggregate metrics in software and computing them at data plane speeds. Looking back at the evolution of other industries, we could draw some parallels between current telecom operations and the state of vehicle manufacturing at the beginning of the 1970s when Japanese vendors introduced robots and production automation at a large scale. That step advance transformed the automobile industry as a whole and led to more reliable and safer cars. We believe that the ICT industries are headed towards a similar wave of transformation, and the development and adoption software-defined operations will play a central role in this process. Software-defined operations is part of the evolution that started with software-defined networking (SDN), a set of technologies that increased the degrees of flexibility and automation in the management and control planes of the network as discussed in RFC 7426. Control protocols such as OpenFlow and the domain-specific languages associated with configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible are typical representatives of this approach. Different solutions have emerged using said tools and associated concepts to further optimize the infrastructure and increase the user friendliness towards developers and operations personnel. Software-defined operations are a stepping stone towards autonomic infrastructure, enabling operations personnel to elevate from mundane hands-on configuration tasks to an interaction driven by higher-layer management and control plane abstractions. This is a shift change compared with the myriad of variables and commands that need to be dealt with in daily routines and are currently part of various certification curricula for operations personnel. Using another automobile metaphor, think of competitive motorsports that have also changed much over the last decades. Yet higher-level abstractions (e.g., pressing buttons instead of manually shifting gears) did not eliminate drivers from Formula 1 teams—they just equipped them with more powerful knobs and levers that allowed them to focus on the situation on the track while driving at significantly higher speeds with greater safety. The road towards software-defined operations needs to overcome a series of challenges. Some of them are presented in a document discussed in the Network Function Virtualization Research Group (NFV RG) at the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). 1 Some prominent challenges include trade-offs in terms of consistency, availability and partitioning (CAP) and observability methods that allow for transparent and programmable specification of compromises between accuracy and the overhead incurred by the infrastructure when measuring values of a certain key performance indicator (KPI). Verification methods adapted to the rapid cycles of resource scale up/down imposed by varying utilization patterns and operator policies were also identified as essential for software-defined operations based on recent research outcomes. 2 This Special Issue focuses on research results that potentially have wide applicability and relevance to simplifying operations in large-scale software-defined infrastructures. Through 2014–2016, the world exper