A Reusable Approach to Network Service Orchestration

The Network Infrastructure as Code paradigm empowers network engineers to create a repository of configurations and automation scripts, facilitating the automated configuration, management, and monitoring of the network infrastructure and services. Moreover, applying standardised approaches to high-level network processes, utilising a common data model for network description, and employing standardised open APIs for components such as the infrastructure inventory, can offer compatibility to the national research and education networks (NRENs). This is of great importance when engaging in federative approaches with others or aiming for reusability to simplify the implementation and deployment of automated and orchestrated network solutions. The GÉANT Global Platform for Labs (GP4L) group is actively exploring network automation and orchestration use cases, including automated monitoring, configuration backup, and service reservation. Collaborating with the Polish NREN PIONIER, the recent activities are set on developing a generalised, reusable approach to orchestrating service provisioning. By abstracting the process to define common steps in service provisioning, the goal is to provide a collaborative blueprint that other NRENs can adopt. The modular nature of the approach allows the creation of a repository of processes, sub-processes, and elementary tasks that can be reused across the community. To demonstrate the practical implementation of this approach GP4L is developing the processes necessary to provision services in PIONIER. We aim to present the concept of developing generalised reusable processes and discuss our challenges and decisions while working on the PIONIER use case. We focus on reusability and sharing lessons learned, building towards a community of network automation and orchestration activities.