SONATA: Service Programming and Orchestration for Virtualized Software Networks

TL;DR

SONATA is a comprehensive framework that simplifies the development, orchestration, and management of virtualized network services, enhancing flexibility, scalability, and multi-tenancy in software-defined networks.

Contribution

It introduces a modular architecture and integrated toolchain for service programming and orchestration in virtualized networks, addressing development and management challenges.

Findings

Provides a fully integrated development and orchestration environment

Supports fine-grained service management and multi-tenancy

Enhances scalability through recursive architecture

Abstract

In conventional large-scale networks, creation and management of network services are costly and complex tasks that often consume a lot of resources, including time and manpower. Network softwarization and network function virtualization have been introduced to tackle these problems. They replace the hardware-based network service components and network control mechanisms with software components running on general-purpose hardware, aiming at decreasing costs and complexity of implementing new services, maintaining the implemented services, and managing available resources in service provisioning platforms and underlying infrastructures. To experience the full potential of these approaches, innovative development support tools and service provisioning environments are needed. To answer these needs, we introduce the SONATA architecture, a service programming, orchestration, and management framework. We present a development toolchain for virtualized network services, fully integrated with a service platform and orchestration system. We motivate the modular and flexible architecture of our system and discuss its main components and features, such as function- and service-specific managers that allow fine- grained service management, slicing support to facilitate multi-tenancy, recursiveness for improved scalability, and full-featured DevOps support.