Meetings/Tacker/Liberty-Midcycle-Meeting-Minutes

Tacker team met face to face on Aug 20th & 21st for a Midcycle meetup at Brocade HQ in San Jose.

Day 1 - Hackathon
Thanks for the those who joined the hackathon. Here are tasks accomplished:

1) Sripriya hacked the Tacker code to support user's tenant-id instead of the always creating Tacker VNF in a special 'service' tenant. Here is the WIP: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/216430

2) Sridhar took care of removing unwanted code in Tacker that did custom agent-based vnf configuration / monitoring. Here is the gerrit review: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/215377

3) Karthik hacked to create a Tacker mgmt-driver to talk to OpenDayLight controller, mount a VNF and apply configuration using Netconf/YANG. A patchset should be available sometime in the near future.

Health Monitoring

 * Tacker will come with ready-to-use loadable monitoring drivers like icmp-ping, http-ping, etc.
 * Merged the metrics from VIM (based on Ceilometer alarms) with loadable monitoring drivers that exists within Tacker. We came up with a generalized design to incorporate both in the TOSCA template.
 * Event name is something each monitoring driver will specify and for now will be available in the monitoring driver documentation.
 * VNF vendors can write their own monitoring driver for VNF specific monitoring attributes (for e.g. vIMS checking calls-per-sec).
 * Bob Haddleton to rework the health-mon spec based on this
 * Monasca integration
 * Monasca will align with custom monitoring driver model - need some one with Monasca-expertise to come and implement within Tacker
 * Team was also wondering if components of Monasca is available in smaller chucks / libraries that tacker could leverage

TOSCA

 * Discussed the upcoming integration with heat-translator and its impact.
 * Open question: how can they facilitate tags that are still in flight (experimental in tacker but not in tosca-nfv).
 * Team decided to actively follow up with Heat-Translator team to communicate our requirement and understand their plan, design, timeline for TOSCA-NFV profile implementation. Tacker team member will start attending heat-translator weekly IRC meetings.

NFVO / NSD support

 * Team decided to extend Tacker to NFVO with a focused use-case. For eg: a three VNF chain - NAT-router --> FW --> DPI.
 * Based on this we will come up with initial scope to start lining up patchsets for this feature.
 * Specific focus is on a simple NSD orchestration with support for VLD, VNFD, and VNFFGD

Tacker - Service Function Chaining (SFC) Integration
Tacker team reviewed two integration options,
 * networking-sfc project and use proposed APIs
 * OpenDayLight-SFC project

We already have a PoC code proposed by OPNFV-SFC subteam to integrate Tacker with ODL-SFC. The team decided to guide this effort and absorb into Tacker as the initial SFC implementation. This is required to realize the initial VNF Forwarding Graph implementations for NSD.

On the use-case side there is requirement to chain VNFs across multi-DCs. This is currently an advanced use-case where inter-VNF chains traverse DC / site boundaries. We need more discussion to support this in Tacker - particularly on how the overlays would get provisioned before such a chain can be realized. This also means Tacker might need multi-site support (master + slaves).

Upcoming milestones
Team made a note of the following up coming major-activities,
 * 1) switch to master
 * 2) MANO API
 * 3) Health Monitoring framework change
 * 4) TOSCA get_input parameterization support

Action Items:

 * 1) Xin to forward VNF configuration best practice SIGCOMM paper
 * 2) Sridhar to document Tacker VNF state-machine

Attendees

 * 1) Srinivasa Changati, Versa Networks
 * 2) Bob Haddleton, Alcatel Lucent
 * 3) Xin Huang, Comcast
 * 4) Vishwanath Jayaraman, Brocade
 * 5) Karthik Natarajan, Brocade
 * 6) Sridhar Ramswamy, Brocade
 * 7) Sripriya Seetharaman, Brocade
 * 8) Haruki Sonehara, Cobham Wireless
 * 9) Stephen Wong, Independent