The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Wednesday introduced two intent-based Northbound Interface (NBI) open source projects, Aspen and Boulder. The two intent-based projects are part of ONF’s ongoing mission to create an ecosystem and architecture that bring open SDN to network operators around the world.
Aspen was developed by ONF in collaboration with the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC), along with HP, Microsoft, and NEC to address automation in multimedia network performance requirements. As multimedia and UC applications increase in popularity, enterprises and service providers are looking for solutions that help in automating Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure great media quality while reducing network complexity and cost, said ONF. Aspen provides code for a real-time media NBI through an OpenFlow® service, allowing applications to leverage SDN to automate QoS for any multimedia service such as voice, video or any real-time media communications.
At the same time, the ONF NBI Working Group collaborated with Ciena, Inocybe Technologies, and HP for the development of Boulder. Boulder was designed to specify the architecture and initial information model for an intent-based interface to the SDN controller. Boulder is designed to enable intent-based portability across different controller platform solutions and provides a layer that shields application developers from all of the specifics of controller implementations, allowing for the creation of a large ecosystem across different domains of the network. Boulder was created to work closely with multiple open source infrastructure controllers such as OpenDaylight (Network Intent Composition project), the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), and OpenStack to provide a native implementation of the information model and community extended capabilities.
Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation
Intent-driven systems are a perfect example of the benefits of abstraction that SDN provides. Applications are freed from having the details of the network infrastructure built into them and thus being subject to change every time there is a change in the network.
