Service Provider DevOps

TL;DR

This paper introduces the SP-DevOps framework to enhance service verification, observability, and troubleshooting in carrier-grade network operations, leveraging software-defined and virtualized network technologies.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive SP-DevOps framework addressing challenges in network management, including on-the-fly verification and automated troubleshooting, with practical tool implementations.

Findings

SP-DevOps reduces fault management costs.

It enables on-the-fly service verification.

The framework supports carrier-grade network operations.

Abstract

Although there is consensus that software defined networking and network functions virtualization overhaul service provisioning and deployment, the community still lacks a definite answer on how carrier-grade operations praxis needs to evolve. This article presents what lies beyond the first evolutionary steps in network management, identifies the challenges in service verification, observability, and troubleshooting, and explains how to address them using our Service Provider DevOps (SP-DevOps) framework. We compendiously cover the entire process from design goals to tool realization and employ an elastic version of an industry-standard use case to show how on-the-fly verification, software-defined monitoring, and automated troubleshooting of services reduce the cost of fault management actions. We assess SP-DevOps with respect to key attributes of software-defined telecommunication infrastructures both qualitatively and quantitatively, and demonstrate that SP-DevOps paves the way toward carrier-grade operations and management in the network virtualization era.