Cloudify Pure-Play NFV Management & Orchestration
Many telcos, enterprises, carriers, service providers and others are looking to replace their physical and legacy network environments, opting to virtualize network functions to meet the growing need for agility and scale through NFV (network function virtualization). The main challenge lies in taking dedicated, proprietary hardware- and software-based network functions, and converting them into virtualized network functions that run on POTS (plain off the shelf) hardware.
Main Features
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TOSCA-based, pure-play orchestration
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Topology-driven and application-centric management and monitoring of entire NFV lifecycle
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Supports legacy network functions
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Built-in auto-healing and auto-scalingpolicies for VNF
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IPv6 Support
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Support for containerized and non-containerized workloads
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Designed for federated deployment
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Embeddable (OEM)
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Support for any application stack, with native OpenStack, bare metal and virtual appliance support
Cloudify is an open source cloud orchestration platform that
faces the challenges of implementing NFV head-on.
Management and Orchestration:
Cloudify’s open and pluggable architecture enables the management and orchestration of the end-to-end NFV
lifecycle, beginning with the deployment and management of the infrastructure resources and SDNs through
monitoring and remediation. Users can define their own custom policies for handling complex processes and
procedures, such as continuous delivery and/or rolling upgrades, for increased agility and faster time to market.
Network Stability Through Full Cloud Portability and Interoperability:
Cloudify can detect a network failure and take corrective actions as those failures happen. On top of this, being
infrastructure agnostic, Cloudify is able to provide full redundancy and high availability through hybrid cloud
models, as well as data center and bare metal cloud support for full flexibility, robustness and synchronization
between remote sites, in a reliable manner
Migration and Co-existence of Legacy and Compatibility with Existing Platform
Cloudify was designed to enable legacy services by adding an orchestration layer that can automate the
configuration, deployment and scaling processes, thus providing a gradual migration path toward a fully elastic
service, leveraging existing infrastructures.
ETSI's MANO and TOSCA Standards:
ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has defined a standard reference architecture to
achieve NFV, along with a management and orchestration layer called MANO. Cloudify essentially plays the role
of the ETSI orchestrator, leveraging its open and pluggable architecture to interface with the Virtual Network
Functions Manager, the Virtual Infrastructure Manager and the Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure to
better orchestrate the lower level software defined networks.
With Telcos and enterprises being highly standard-driven, the alignment with MANO is an important element
for NFV adoption. This is where the adoption of a standard like TOSCA is becoming an important criterion in the
choice of an orchestration platform. Cloudify is based on TOSCA (Topology Orchestration Specification for Cloud
Applications). This specification, from the OASIS standards foundation, provides a standard templating language
in simple YAML blueprints that is agnostic to application, topology, tool or environment. TOSCA defines virtual
application topologies, VNF dependencies and relationships, along with the actions to be performed as part of
the full application lifecycle.
Cloudify based on TOSCA is becoming a real game changer when it comes to NFV-enablement, making it easy
to plugin to other Telco industry standards, such as YANG/Netconf in order to minimize the learning curve and
leverage existing network administrator know-how, and is fully compatible with ETSI’s MANO.