Monitoring and debugging using an SDK for NFV-powered telecom applications
Steven Van Rossem, Wouter Tavernier, Manuel Peuster, Didier Colle, Mario Pickavet, Piet M. A. Demeester · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2016
The next generation of telecom services will require an unprecedented level of flexibility and functionality.In this 5G network context, Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offer new ways of managing the network and the connected traffic processing nodes.This leads to a programmable way to do Service Function Chaining (SFC), effectively automating the deployment and management of such network services.The growing interest and development in the field of virtualization techniques such as virtual machines or containers further proves that software can indeed play an increasingly important role within telecom services, an area previously dominated by hardware appliances.As a side effect, these softwarization and virtualization techniques also enable a very high degree of customization and configurability, which can also introduce bugs into the service definition, complicating and potentially slowing down service provisioning.In order to close the gap between the development and operations side of a provided service (DevOps), adequate tools are required that allow rapid testing and verification of any modified parameter.To this end we present a set of monitoring and debugging functionalities in the context of aSoftware Development Kit (SDK) that allows a service developer to rapidly setup and provision a network service.By demonstrating how several example services can be deployed in this SDK, we show how this light-weight toolchain can be used to rapidly develop and debug NFV-based services.