Okinawa Open Laboratory Enables SDN and Cloud DevOps with CloudShell

Okinawa Open Laboratory (OOL) was established by NTT Communications Corporation (NT T Com), NEC Corporation (NEC) and IIGA Co., Ltd. (IIGA) to integrate SDN and cloud computing technologies with support from Okinawa Prefectural Government. OOL allows Engineers f rom pr ivate companies and academic organizations from Japan and around the world use OOL's services to develop and verify SDN and cloud technologies such as OpenFlow, OpenDaylight, and OpenStack for commercial use cases.

About OkinawaOpen Lab

OOL built and maintains a cloud and SDN test bed in Okinawa that provides the infrastructure and networking resources needed to develop and test interoperable, commercially-relevant SDN and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) use case scenarios. Since most member organizations’ R&D teams were remote from Okinawa, OOL needed to provide a collaboration-friendly way to access the test bed resources. OOL’s technical team determined that they needed a DevOps-style web self-service orchestration platform that allowed member organization personnel to create dynamic sandboxes. Even though they were focused on R&D and testing of orchestration technologies such as OpenStack, they determined that it would take a signi�cant amount of initial time and work, plus ongoing maintenance to build the DevOps collaboration platform based on open source code. The technical team decided that it would be optimal to �nd a commercial platform that could allow them to achieve their members’ desired functionality faster. However, the platform needed to meet a number of requirements:

Handle many di�erent types of elements, including switches, OpenStack elements, hypervisors and VMs, cloud orchestrators, SDN controllers, commercial, open-source and proprietary software.

O�er more than a static catalog; provide dynamic sandbox creation to users.

Provide open interface creation to keep pace with new technologies and API’s.

Business Challenge

CloudShellsystems

CustomerCaseStudy

OkinawaOpen Laboratory

CloudShellsystems

OOL chose CloudShell, a DevOps infrastructure orchestration and automation platform from QualiSystems. CloudShell o�ers a rich set of features and capabilities that enable agile infrastructure self-service, cloud evolution, converged infrastructure and data center provisioning, and SDN/NFV network DevOps.

Infrastructure orchestrationCloudShell manages an inventory of physical, virtual and public cloud resources as a resource pool. CloudShell can manage physical infrastructure in a highly granular fashion, so that individual network ports for example, can be allocated rather than entire switches. All resources are de�ned as objects in a library structure with user-de�ned attributes. Abstract resource de�nitions based solely on attribute value-matching can then be created to maximize resource utilization within environment templates. The result is that any mix of infrastructure, including legacy, physical, virtual and public cloud resources can be deployed in an environment and provisioned and reclaimed in a repeatable process.

QualiSystems Solution

modeling so that architects can create and publish standardized catalog o�erings, DevOps power users can create their own environments on the �y and authorized users can be allowed to drag and drop new resources in real-time onto active and in-use environments, while other users can be restricted to only using prede�ned catalog o�erings. Sandboxes can be constructed based on resource abstraction and templates that allow defaults as well as user input to set con�guration parameters that then drive per environment auto-provisioning, auto-reclamation and other work�ows.

Be purpose-built for DevOps use case scenarios, where users would be rapidly bringing up and provisioning test environments, collaborating, then tearing them down and releasing resources for others to use.

Self-service portalCloudShell presents a highly �exible way to o�er self-service to a broad diversity of users, ranging from true dynamic sandboxing to IT-managed catalog o�erings. The portal supports live environment

DevOps reservation systemUsers interacting with the web-based self-service catalog can immediately "reserve" environments, choosing only a time duration, or can use a scheduling utility to reserve the environment for a future timeframe. Once the reservation starts, the user is prompted for any resource or con�guration parameter inputs, the appropriate resources are allocated and marked as reserved in the inventory, and then an auto-provisioning work�ow begins the setup. Administrators can de�ne a maximum window for reservation at any given time, while users can be allowed to extend their reservation as needed. Before the reservation ends, if users have made any modi�cations to the baseline con�guration of the elements or have dragged and dropped new resources into the environment, they can save a complete "snapshot" of the environment, so that they can easily resume work at a later time. When the reservation ends either by timing-out or due to the user proactively closing it, an auto-reclamation work�ow performs teardown, resetting all resources to their baseline state and releasing them so that they can be e�ectively deployed by other users. This reservation, provisioning, snapshot, reclamation and release process promotes optimal productivity and resource utilization.

CloudShellsystems

Tatsuya Yamashita, Leader of OOL’s Technology Group, said “CloudShell is an innovation platform enabler, allowing OOL to spur industry innovation with open source technologies. OOL is dedicated to working with best-of-breed ICT enablers, such as Qualisystems, to enable the broader ICT community to achieve and transform cloud computing, SDN and NFV.”

CloudShell has made a substantial di�erence in OOL’s business and technical agility by o�ering an open infrastructure orchestrationand technology integration framework platform. CloudShell frees OOL’s technical team from needing to build and maintain an orchestration automation platform, allowing them to focus on delivering and expanding upon an excellent set of SDN and cloud DevOps sandbox services.

Conclusion

After adopting CloudShell, OOL was able to offer DevOps sandbox collaboration from its cloud test bed, resulting in a number of benefits for members, who can:

Business Value

Utilize on-demand hardware and software resources for rapid development and testing without needing to purchase or setup separate test beds.

Conduct real-time modeling and management of their own network topologies based on datacenter-wide SDN connectivity.

Test and verify their native cloud applications using OOL’s orchestration platform with OpenStack and SDN technologies.

Rapidly prototype and validate new ideas, proof-of-concepts, and estimate system performance based on physical hardware environments.

For more information about QualiSystems, visit our website at: www.qualisystems.com

GUI automation authoringCloudShell o�ers an object-based, GUI-driven automation authoring tool that allows extension of business logic by developing sophisticated provisioning and other work�ows for setup and teardown of DevOps infrastructure environments. This allows OOL members to customize orchestration to support their innovative use cases.

Rapidly integrate its own technology innovations and software components by independently creating automation building block drivers in CloudShell’s authoring tool. For example, OOL was able to integrate an internally developed SDN network con�guration system called OpenFlow-Patch, as well as a user and tenant management component.

Easily add, update and maintain datacenter infrastructure hardware, test devices and available software resources and make them available via CloudShell’s web portal catalog, so members have a growing selection of commercial and open-source products and resources for their development and testing endeavors.