Genie in a Network (GIN)™ is a TOSCA-based service life cycle and FCAPS management platform that addresses the challenges of handling increased need for automation, being cloud native, and dealing with lifecycle management of network functions, management functions, and infrastructure on which it runs. The platform allows you to build a comprehensive model of a service including resources, workflows, policies, and analytics it depends on – all defined in one location.
It adopts a number of core foundational principles to tackle the complexity of modern network deployments:
Declarative – A declarative approach reduces complexity. It focuses on the “what” rather than the “how”. The automation platform translates the declarative to the imperative.
Model-Driven – A model-driven approach provides a consistent set of models used by all platform components. It helps automation by using the meta-model or “modeling language” to define the automation functionality associated with the modeled components.
End-to-End – Service designers and network function designers can design all aspects of lifecycle management in one place. Service and network function deployment packages support all aspects of Day 0 design, Day 1 deployment, and Day 2 lifecycle management, including service assurance.
Comprehensive – End-to-end automation systems must not only handle lifecycles and assurance of services and network functions, but also the infrastructure on which network functions are hosted and the service lifecycle management systems themselves.
Cloud-Native – A cloud-native system helps facilitate a loosely-coupled event-driven architecture over tightly-coupled monolithic systems. It allows us to dynamically scale network management functions and make them easily distributable all the way to the edge.
Open and Extensible – The architecture supports open interfaces to integrate with existing management systems and to support addition of custom management functionality.
These foundational principles allow true automation without adding complexity.
The key features of the platform can be summarized as follows:
- Consistent TOSCA based models for Day 1 orchestration and Day 2 operation, removing the need for subdomain orchestrators like APPC, VNFC, and SDNC.
- Inferred workflows from relationships defined in the service model
- Explicit workflows can also be specified in the TOSCA model. No separate definition required in an external workflow engine.
- Policies can be specified in the TOSCA model. No separate definition required in an external policy framework/engine.
- Monitoring and analytics designed in conjunction with services and service components, and bundled with Service Models.
- Multi-cloud deployment for a model can be declared in the model using the TOSCA substitution mapping feature
- Persistence storage for the model and resources built on TOSCA entities, that requires no changes to the schema for new resources or components.
While GIN is inspired by ONAP, GIN adopts a fundamentally different architecture which allows it to address the many shortcomings of ONAP.