A network service development kit supporting the end-to-end lifecycle of NFV-based telecom services

Abstract

Ongoing evolutions in the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) area show that software will play an increasingly important role within the telecommunication industry. It enables telco providers to faster introduce telecom services, combined with new possibilities to optimize and fine-tune operational performance. New virtualization and softwarization methods support fine-grained scaling of resources and highly-customizable configuration settings. Additionally, multi-datacenter topologies are available to deploy the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) a service consists of. In this context, specialized tools are needed for debugging and validating the deployment, placement, chaining, configuration and scaling of network services, before the operator deploys the service in production. This demo showcases an open-source Software Development Kit (SDK), built to support NFV-based services throughout their whole lifecycle. During the demo, several example VNFs will be loaded into the SDK environment to demonstrate the features a service developer is envisioned to use, while either creating or updating NFV-based telecom services.