Business Rationale and Technical Overview for Orchestration and Autonomic Control Loops R16.0.1 (IG1139)

Service providers face an increasingly complicated and dynamic business environment, full of new competitors and pressures, but also new technologies and opportunities. To survive and thrive, they are considering their overall “design, deploy, operate” (sometimes referred to as Think, Build, Run) processes and the infrastructure that supports those processes. The problem space is becoming larger, with more players, and more moving parts and that enlargement reveals a clear need for a mechanism to bring an efficient and purposeful order, an architecture.

As suggested by its title, this Introductory Guide proposes an architecture based on orchestration accomplished through a federation of domains and autonomic control loops. First, however, we will motivate and explain the reason for those architectural elements, and then we shall explore them in some detail, cite examples, and identify areas for future work. As a result of that future work, this Introductory Guide is intended to evolve it is being released in its current form to both stimulate the industry conversation and to attract critiques and consider input for its evolution. Some suggestions for continued work are already noted, and we expect that list of suggestions to grow.