NaaS automation delivers clear operational and customer benefits

AT&T is champion of the Catalyst project, Automating network-as-a-service (NaaS) Lambda (λ) services (the lambda symbol signifies wavelength) because it wanted to investigate the concept of NaaS. To do this, the team utilized TM Forum’s Open APIs, which are designed to enable systems’ interoperability quickly and easily. The communications service provider (CSP) is supported by participants Amdocs, Blue Planet (a division of Ciena), Ciena, IBM and Tech Mahindra.

Ernie Bayha, Lead NaaS Architect at AT&T and Catalyst project lead, comments, “It was challenging because we had multiple suppliers that were implementing code in their own cloud environments and those cloud environments needed to interoperate and work together. We didn't have all the equipment in one place or all the code in one place, we had to interoperate the code all across the world.” He views this as a positive thing as the pandemic will probably change work practices and this collaborative, virtual way of working will likely become the new normal.

The team developed four use cases which they demonstrate in this on-demand video as part of the TM Forum Catalyst Digital Showcase. The first use case defines the design time, service model for a composite wavelength service built into a service catalog which is distributed to the various domains involved in the runtime of the service, such as for end to end service management. The team used the TMF633 API to define and distribute the service catalog elements or models. The API manages the service catalog elements across a service’s lifecycle.

The second use case is to define the runtime fulfilment of the service for which they had built the model. They chose a 100Gbps composite wavelength service which they created with the Service Ordering Management API (TMF641) – a standardized mechanism for placing an order including the requisite parameters. The API allows users to create, update and retrieve service orders and manages related notifications. The third NaaS use case is very important to many CSPs – the ability to cancel a service once in flight but before it reaches the point of no return (PONR). The project’s co-lead, Allison Whittaker, Area Manager Member of Tech Staff at AT&T, explains, “You want to give customers the flexibility to change their minds instead of the CSP having to activate the service and start billing them before we can cancel it, placing a lot of pressure on operations teams and processes.

“Being able to cancel services before the point of no return would simplify operations and avoid both parties going through a complex, time consuming process to cancel a service in the network.”

To demonstrate this cancellation capability for NaaS, the team carried out the first implementation of TMF641v4 Cancel Service Order resource and associated notifications. This Cancel capability was added to and made publicly available in TMF641v4 at the end of May 2020, and the team was able to build it within a month. The fourth use case looked to API TM630 which is under development and defines the Forum’s API hub approach to integrating digital ecosystems. The team is interested in publishing and subscribing to notifications that exists in the network.

Bayha comments, “We wanted to explore that ‘pub-sub’ approach to understand how difficult it was to implement and then share our implementation experiences of the Notification Handler (with the TM Forum)”.

He stresses that contributing learnings back to the Forum’s collaboration community is important because, “TM Forum has a large number of assets, but it's not always easy to understand how to put them all together and how to use them. In the course of applying the various APIs, we have learned quite a bit regarding TMF641, TMF638, and TMF633. We will be sharing our implementation experiences, and provide clarifications and enhancements to those APIs as well as for TMF630, to enable others to better use those assets – to make them more immediately usable”. The team is also in the process of producing a Service Fulfillment Playbook for TMF641, which will outline their contribution of implementing wavelength services end to end. They plan to provide drafts of Service Fulfillment Guide for a TM Forum Introductory Guide (IG) to show others how to fulfill the wavelength service using TM Forum Open APIs. The team is already planning the second phase for the next Catalyst Digital Showcase which is scheduled for October. Bayha says, “We have decided to add some exciting new features on top of what we have already built”.

He notes, “One lesson from the first phase is we realized we had not grasped the importance of some elements at the start of the project and had to adjust priorities, which is a good thing. For instance, we didn’t fully appreciate the fundamental role of inventory, which was supplied by Blue Planet, in demonstrating the NaaS catalyst digital showcase."

Whittaker concludes that should AT&T ever decide to operationalize services using the NaaS model, the knowledge gained here would feed directly into helping with the necessary, complex systems integration. Watch the video below for a summary of the project: