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Model-Driven Programmability

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are moving away from legacy manual service creation and activation processes and replacing them with automation and DevOps methodologies that modernize their operations environment, support the unique demands of critical technologies like NFV and 5G, and accelerate service innovation.  The Blue Planet® Intelligent Automation portfolio—which incorporates sophisticated model-driven programmability and service templating—helps CSPs achieve their goals.

Blue Planet creates a common, vendor-independent model of the entire network topology, including physical and virtual elements, physical and logical interfaces, and their inter-connectivity. This model acts like a catalog that describes all relevant aspects of the orchestrated domains. All service orchestration and control is initiated via dynamic interaction with this model. This concept is very similar to traditional network management, except now the scope of orchestration is wider and can go beyond pure networking.

Service templates can easily be created to define service configurations that are built on top of the abstracted network resources identified in the model. These templates can be dynamically invoked to automate the activation of services made up of any physical and/or virtual resources, independent of the underlying domains.

Blue Planet uses an easy-to-understand declarative templating language that allows the service designer to directly define what sub-resources should make up the service, and how the sub-resources should be constructed (such as input attributes, build order, and other related data). In addition to declarative templating, Blue Planet also supports imperative (scripted) operations that can be used to implement custom operations.

Customers can use the Blue Planet DevOps Toolkit to easily on-board new service templates, and the Blue Planet DevOps Exchange streamlines the efforts of in-house product development teams by providing template libraries and other related resources; the Exchange also facilitates ‘open source-style’ collaboration between Blue Planet customers and ecosystem partners.

Alternatively, for CSPs that want to integrate their current operations environment with Blue Planet, we also support Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)—the gold standard for process modeling. This lets CSPs use their current service models and operations support systems (OSS) to program Blue Planet, which automates the service fulfillment process.

Field-proven and broadly deployed, Blue Planet’s model-driven programmability, flexible service templates and BPMN support help CSPs adopt more dynamic and responsive on-demand network services—and the ability to develop their own service templates further accelerates and de-risks their service innovation initiatives.

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