Preamble
CNTT develops a limited number of NFVI reference architectures. While technology and deployment aspects may differ between them, each of the CNTT reference architectures is based on a common CNTT Reference Model.
There are a number of key architectural principles that apply to all Reference Architectures produced by CNTT. These principles are enumerated below. They are meant to be general and at a high level, and limited in number. Some of the chapters of this document will include more specific principles to provide the implementation guidelines for a particular function or a specific component. Note that the Architectural Principles discussed in this Chapter follow the over-arching principles provided in CNTT Reference Model:Introduction:Principles
We need to distinguish between architectural principles and architectural requirements elaborated later in this document. The principles are here to guide our architectural thinking, while requirements should be understood as a check list used to gauge a level of compliance of a NFVI implementation to the CNTT reference architecture.
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Open source preference: To ensure, by building on technology available in open source projects, that suppliers’ and operators’ investment have a tangible pathway towards a standard and production ready NFVI solution portfolio.
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Open APIs: To enable interoperability and component substitution, and minimize integration efforts by uisng openly published API definitions.
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Separation of concerns: To promote lifecycle independence of different architectural layers and modules (e.g. disagregation of software from hardware).
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Automated lifecycle management: To minimize costs of the end-to-end lifecycle, maintenance downtime (target zero downtime), avoid errors and discrepancies resulting from manual processes.
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Automated scalability: To minimize costs and operational impacts through automated policy-driven scaling of workloads by enabling automated horizontal scalability of workloads.
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Automated closed loop assurance: To minimize operational costs and simplify NFVI platform operations by using automated fault resolution and performance optimization.
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Cloud nativeness: To optimise the utilization of resources and enable operational efficiencies.
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Security compliance: To ensure the architecture follows the industry best security practices and is at all levels compliant to relevant security regulations.
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Resilience and Availability: To allow High Availability and Resilience for hosted VNFs, and to avoid Single Point of Failure.