5G & Future Telco Technologies ZTP tasks: NFVI/Cloud Infrastructure Automation

In the previous articles, we have discussed about End to end orchestration of Network Services and importance of MANO/Automation in 5G & future technologies.

As part of this mini series we will now break down the key tasks at high level that need to be performed for Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) of architectural elements that make up the Telco technology stack — NFV/cloud infrastructure, Network functions & Network Service/Application workload deployment.

In this first article we will start with the NFV Infrastructure/cloud infrastructure ZTP.

NFV/Cloud Infrastructure ZTP Automation

For the Telco data center, Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure(NFVI) / cloud infrastructure setup will start from initial server setup encompass entire cloud deployment, configuration till integration with assurance & monitoring systems for day 2/n operations both manually & using closed loop automation.

Day 0 — Cloud Infra Setup related tasks:

1. Server provisioning: For private/hybrid cloud setups, configuration of BIOS, Firmware & RAID on the Server Hardware either directly using RedFish APIs or using Hardware Vendors EMS eg HP One View for HP servers, Dell OME for Dell Servers,etc.
2. Cloud platform pre-requisite setup — In case the cloud platform deployment requires any pre-requisites/dependencies that need to be setup/configured then these need to be included as part of automation tasks. eg: Setup & configuration of RHEL server/VM with QEMU-KVM for hosting VMs; provisioning/bastion server/VM ;DNS server; DHCP server; Load balancer(eg HA proxy); webserver; external storage (Ceph cluster/NFS storage); etc
3. Cloud platform setup — Actual deployment / setup of cloud platform on the infrastructure (private/public/hybrid cloud) once all dependencies are ready and verifying that basic setup is completed successfully.

Day 1 — Cloud infra configuration related tasks:

1. Cloud platform configuration as per telco data center design & requirements — Integration of Storage with cloud platform for persistent storage, Enabling necessary Network Routing & network policies, Creation of Users & User groups from perspective of Multi tenancy and Role Based Access Control.
2. Telco application specific hardware networking setup & configuration on the Cloud platform like Multus, MetalLb, SRIOV, DPDK.
3. Cloud Readiness/User Acceptance Test to validate that the cloud infrastructure is ready for 5G/6G+ Network functions/Network service/Application workload deployments At this stage cloud infrastructure can be considered ready.

Day 2-N — Operation tasks post cloud infra setup:

1. Cloud platform Upgrade to higher version
2. Integration of cloud infrastructure platform with monitoring & Management Systems — ELK, Assurance/Monitoring/Fault Management systems; Closed loop Assurance — Proactive & Reactive : (a) Compute nodes Scale out, Scale in. (b) Cloud Nodes replacement. © Cloud Backup & restore.

As these tasks are post cloud infra setup these will be independent Automations/ZTP packages that need to be executed when required as part of Operations Lifecycle. However, under the perview of cloud infra automation these will still need to be considered and included in the overall design & implementation.

Having ZTP scripts for the above Day0,1,2-N tasks which can be executed from 1 click will enable operators to be able to deploy infrastructure for 5G & Future technologies on the fly as and when needed with minimal technical intervention (after the automation are ready & tested. Initial setup will require time, R&D & effort to get the infra ready as per the telco requirements.)

Disclaimer: The post above expresses my sole viewpoint and not the opinion of any organization I work with presently or in the past.