Network Working Group B. Liu Internet-Draft Huawei Technologies Intended status: Informational B. Carpenter Expires: January 3, 2019 Univ. of Auckland July 2, 2018 Roadmap to a Networkless World draft-liu-nmrg-networkless-roadmap-00 Abstract This draft aims to illustrate possible approaches to make network management and operations more autonomic in several aspects. The ultimate goal is that the network could run all by itself, so that users/administrators just feel like there isn't a network to take care of at all (a.k.a. "Networkless"). The approaches are described in a form of different levels (inspired by the Self-Driven Car levels). The higher the level is, the more autonomic management capabilities the network could have. Please note that although some specific technologies are categorized into different levels, it is not the draft's intent to rank them; rather, this draft is more about discussing what's the possible next stage and what's the ultimate vision. Hopefully, this draft could collect people's consensus in the industry and provide guidance for future technology developments. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on January 3, 2019. Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Goals of Networkless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. Self-Organization Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.2. Self-Configuration Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.3. Self-Optimization and Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.4. Self-Diagnostic Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.5. Self-Healing Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3. Key Capablities to Achieve Networkless . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.1. Network Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.2. Decision and Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.3. Operation Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 7. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1. Introduction As the network is evolving rapidly, the system is becoming more and more complex; thus managing a network is more and more challenging. It has been a common feeling in the industry that the Opex of running networks is becoming a vital pain point. To address the management complexity challenges, there are new technologies emerging. For example, Autonomic Networking [RFC7575], which is under standardization in IETF Anima working group [Anima], is following an approach to allow the network elements do more management related things by themselves; the SDN, which has been significantly improved the network service delivery efficiency in some scenarios; and more recently, the Intent-Based Network concept, which focuses more on the operational simplicity perspective, to allow users/administrators Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 controll the network system in a radically simple way (a.k.a. Intent-driven, rather than detailed configurations). This draft is not proposing a new technology, rather, this draft collects available tecnologies and illustrates possible future technologies and the final effect to network users/administrators. The ultimate goal is that the network could run all by itself, so that users/administrators just feel like there isn't a network to take care of at all (a.k.a. "Networkless"). In Section 2, the network management is divided into several aspect for discussion, in a administrator perspective. In each aspect there are automation/autonomicity levels to illustrate past (Level 0), current state of art (Level 1) and possible future technologies (Level 2-4). Section 3 focuses on some common and vital capabilities the network system needs to have, in order to support the goals described in Section 2. 2. Goals of Networkless 2.1. Self-Organization Levels Self-organization represents the ability that network nelements could autonomically connect with each other, form domains, or even decide the topology/hierarchy/architecture. o Level 0: LAN auto-connection - E.g. current Ethernets can connected with each other without any configurations once the cables are connected. o Level 1: IP auto-routing & NE auto-connection to NMS - IGP and BGP protocols allow the routers to connect with each other autonomically. - NEs automatically get connected with the NMS, current solutions includes DCN, Anima ACP [I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane] etc. o Level 2: Network Areas Self-Division and Key NEs election - E.g. IGP Area self-division; controller election o Level 3: Network Architecture and NE roles Self-identification Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 - E.g. autonomically identify topology characteristics and divide network layers; autonomically identify roles such as access gateway, aggregation gateway, core gateway etc. o Level 4: Self-Construction of Network Topologies - E.g. for wireless network or overlay virtual networks 2.2. Self-Configuration Levels o Level 0: CLI - remote log-in, do configs one by one o Level 1: NE Configs Auto-delivery - Administrators design detailed configurations of each NE, using NMS/Controller automatically deliver the configurations o Level 2/3: NE Configs Auto-Compiling - Administrators design network architecture and solutions, the network autonomically compiles detailed NE configurations. - All detailed configurations are hosted by software. - More and more machine-native configurations rather than human interfaces. o Level 4: Network Self-Orchestration - Administrators/Apps only input highly abstracted service requests (e.g., build a wireless backhaul network), then the network would deduce all configurations. 2.3. Self-Optimization and Levels This sub-section focuses on traffic forwarding performance of the network, mainly include path selection and QoS related issues. o Level 0: Static Traffic Engineering o Level 1: Auto Traffic Load Balance - Controller dynamically adjust paths to achieve balanced traffic load, according to specific algorithms; - NE can achieve port-based load balance locally Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 o Level 2/3: Comprehensive SLA/QoS Self-Optimization - The network autonomically optimizes delay, bandwidth etc. according to Administrators or App's requirements; - The network autonomically achieves measurement according to the optimization goal. o Level 4: Autonomous Optimization - The network generates optimization policies by itself, and keep the performance at the best level; - Meanwhile, achieves balance between performance and cost. 2.4. Self-Diagnostic Levels This sub-section focuses on network fault diagnostic. o Level 0: NMS-assisted manual diagnostic - Administrators use tools like ping/tracroute to mannual diagnostic o Level 1: Automatic Data Analysis - Software collects data around the whole network, and use data mining/machine learning and decision tree to aggregate alarms and analyze the cause. o Level 2/3: Precise Fault Location - Precise alarms to report the exact fault events. - Precise location to reveal the real root cause. o Level 4: Fault Prediction 2.5. Self-Healing Levels o Level 0: NMS-assisted manual healing - Administrators use NMS to manually recover the configurations or do the adjustment. o Level 1: Protocol-based Healing Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 - Fixed healing functions built into NEs, such as BFD, and FRR etc. o Level 2: Programmable Healing - Administrators can set specific healing policies based on a set of general and abstracted rules of dealing with fault. o Level 3/4: Fault Avoiding - According to the prediction, avoid the fault by backup, adjust traffic etc. 3. Key Capablities to Achieve Networkless 3.1. Network Perception o Level 0: NE-based Statistics and Probe - E.g. NE port statistics; end to end probe o Level 1: Network Visualization - Telemetry, logs/event analysis etc. o Level 2: Real-time Holographic Network Data - Network Digital Twin; - NE deeply sense local traffic and fault etc. o Level 3: Network Modeling and Pattern Recognition - Comprehensive modeling for complex network problems; - Pattern recognition to identify current network status o Level 4: Network Event/Traffic Trend Prediction 3.2. Decision and Reasoning o Level 0: Fixed Control Loops - The control loop functions are embbed in specific protocols/ modules, such as IGP, DHCP, Anima BRSKI [I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra] , and Anima ACP [I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane] etc. Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 o Level 1: Programmable Control Loops - Algorithms (in Controller or Autonomic Service Agent) for specific functions and scenarios - might embed some Machine Learning capabilities. o Level 2: Machine Learning - General control loops, driven by specific Intents (e.g. Intent provides the Reward definition of the reinforcement learning) o Level 3: Machine Inference - Configuration/optimization/diagnostic/healing policies inference o Level 4: (To be filled) 3.3. Operation Interface o Level 0: CLI - Manual management oriented interface; batch processing within a machine (e.g. Shell) o Level 1: NE-level Primitive API - Controller oriented NE-level API containing detailed configurations. (E.g. Openflow, Netconf/YANG) o Level 2: NE-level Declarative API - Orchestrator oriented NE-level declarative API - Orchestrator doesn't need to care about detailed NE specific configurations o Level 3: Network-level Declarative API - User/Administrator oriented declarative API, to make the network be called as a service. o Level 4: Machine-native Autonomous API - The machines would autonomously construct the content of the APIs to fulfill the need of collaboration between modules. Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 4. Security Considerations TBD. 5. IANA Considerations No IANA assignment is needed. 6. Acknowledgements The initial idea of this work and the "networkless" concept were from Xiaofei Xu. 7. Informative References [Anima] "https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/anima/about/". [I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane] Eckert, T., Behringer, M., and S. Bjarnason, "An Autonomic Control Plane (ACP)", draft-ietf-anima-autonomic-control- plane-16 (work in progress), June 2018. [I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra] Pritikin, M., Richardson, M., Behringer, M., Bjarnason, S., and K. Watsen, "Bootstrapping Remote Secure Key Infrastructures (BRSKI)", draft-ietf-anima-bootstrapping- keyinfra-16 (work in progress), June 2018. [I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model] Behringer, M., Carpenter, B., Eckert, T., Ciavaglia, L., and J. Nobre, "A Reference Model for Autonomic Networking", draft-ietf-anima-reference-model-06 (work in progress), February 2018. [RFC7575] Behringer, M., Pritikin, M., Bjarnason, S., Clemm, A., Carpenter, B., Jiang, S., and L. Ciavaglia, "Autonomic Networking: Definitions and Design Goals", RFC 7575, DOI 10.17487/RFC7575, June 2015, . Authors' Addresses Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 8] Internet-Draft Networkless July 2018 Bing Liu Huawei Technologies Q14, Huawei Campus No.156 Beiqing Road Hai-Dian District, Beijing 100095 P.R. China Email: leo.liubing@huawei.com Brian Carpenter Department of Computer Science University of Auckland PB 92019 Auckland 1142 New Zealand Email: brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com Liu & Carpenter Expires January 3, 2019 [Page 9]