Ubicity Orchestrator™
Ubicity Orchestrator™ is a pure TOSCA-based service lifecycle manager that supports service deployment and activation, ongoing service management, and service deactivation. Ubicity Orchestrator™ is domain-independent, which means that it can be used for a variety of application domains as well as for services that span multiple application domains.
Features
Ubicity Orchestrator™ supports the following features:
- Service Decomposition: High-level service templates present abstract service descriptions that hide implementation and technology details. At deployment time, Ubicity Orchestrator™ decomposes abstract services into technology and vendors-specific subcomponents using the TOSCA substitution mapping feature. The choice of sub-topology depends on available resources, on policies, or on user preferences.
- Resource Matching: Service designers express resource requirements explicitly in their service templates using the TOSCA requirements feature. At deployment time, Ubicity Orchestrator™ matches these requirements with resources found in its Resource Inventory.
- Automatic Workflow Creation: Ubicity Orchestrator™ automatically generates workflows based on the relationships expressed in service topologies. This prevents errors by eliminating the need for service designers to manually create workflows.
- Service Update: Ubicity Orchestrator™ supports Moves, Adds, Changes, and Deletions (MACDs) to running services. Orchestrator compares the requested changes to the state of the running service and only modifies those components that need to be changed.
- Closed-Loop Automation: Ubicity Orchestrator™ supports closed-loop automation by using Event-Condition-Action policies to automatically handle events that signal error conditions.
These features are supported for all services expressed using the TOSCA language and do not require any domain-specific extensions.
Components
Ubicity Orchestrator™ includes the following components:
- Lifecycle Manager that perfors all service lifecycle management functions, including service decomposition, running workflows, and policy-based closed-loop automation. All lifecycle management actions operate on a service instance model first and are then synchronized to the actual service components and resources in the external world.
- Service Instance Model Inventory that stores representations of all the services managed by Ubicity Orchestrator™ All lifecycle management actions operate on the service instance model.
- Service Catalog that stores the set of deployable services. Service designers onboard Service Archives that contain service models and their associated lifecycle management artifacts into the catalog. End-user select service from this catalog when deploying new services.
- Resource Inventory that stores and manages available resources on top of which services can be deployed. Resource providers use TOSCA-based resource models to onboard their resources into the Resource Inventory. Examples of the types of resources that can be onboarded include IaaS clouds, Kubernetes Clusters, SDN Networks, uCPE devices, bare metal servers, etc.
- Profile Library that provides collections of reusable components from which service templates can be created. Domain experts organize their domain-specific service component models into Profiles that can then be introduced and stored in Orchestrator's™ Profile Library.
Because Ubicity Orchestrator™ is model-driven across all layers of the cloud stack, there is no need for domain-specific controllers or virtual infrastructure managers. All domain-specific information is encoded in the service models themselves using the TOSCA standard.