Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

 
 

Service Orchestration Overview

Service orchestration is the process of designing, configuring, validating, deploying, and monitoring a network service; for example, Layer 3 VPN (L3VPN) service. From service orchestration perspective, a network service is any point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, or multipoint-to-multipoint connection. Paragon Automation provides an automated framework that manages the entire life cycle of a network service, right from design to deprovisioning the service from the network.

Service orchestration in Paragon Automation is model-driven and intent-based. That is, a network administrator can specify the requirements of a service in predefined service models or service designs that Paragon Automation provides in the service catalog. You use the service design to create a service instance. A service instance defines the sites, devices, connections and other parameters of the service. Once you publish the service instance, a service order is created, which starts the service provisioning workflow. The workflow takes care of transforming the service design into a network service instance. The network service instance contains the configuration to allocate network resources to provision the service.

You can provision network services from the Paragon Automation GUI, the service orchestration cMGD CLI, or programmatically by using REST API.

Paragon Automation provides the following types of service designs to onboard device to the network and to provision network services on the onboarded devices:

  • Infrastructure service design to onboard and deploy devices to the network.

  • Routing and Layer 3 address service designs to configure network resource pools for the infrastructure service.

  • Topology and VPN service designs to configure network resource pools for the L3VPN service.

  • L3VPN service design to provision and monitor L3VPN services in the network.

These service designs are preinstalled when you install Paragon Automation.

Service Orchestration in Paragon Automation consists of the following elements:

  • Service Catalog─A service catalog is a collection of predefined service designs that are available for the organization. Service designs are version-controlled and you can upgrade the service designs without having to upgrade the Paragon Automation cluster.

  • Service Designs─Service orchestration in Paragon Automation is model-driven, that is, service orchestration is carried out through predefined service designs or models, which contain the specifications for a type of service.

  • Service Instance─A service instance is a specific instance of a service design created for a customer. For example, a named instance of an L3VPN service created for a specific customer. Services are orchestrated from service instances.

  • Placement─Process of allocating network resources required for provisioning a service instance.

  • Service Order─Process of creating, modifying, or deleting a service instance. You can view the status of a service order.

  • Workflow─A workflow is a sequence of tasks that Paragon Automation executes to provision a service. You can monitor workflows and access logs that help you troubleshoot failed service orders.

For devices on which service provisioning is supported, see Supported Devices and OS Versions.

Note:

You can provision services on greenfield and brownfield devices.