Resilient deployment of virtual network functions

Moving services to the cloud is a trend that has been going on for years now, with a constant increase in sophistication and complexity of such services. Today, even critical infrastructure operators are considering moving their services and data to the cloud; most prominently are telecommunication operators, who are calling for running their service as so-called virtual network services. These services are usually composed from a set of components, each with individual resilience and scalability requirements. Hence, the problem of describing the blueprint of how to build a service from its components, including the components' requirements, and how to derive an actual deployment from such a blueprint needs to be solved. In this paper, we present a first step in this direction. We have developed an information model to describe the resources and components of complex composite services, and a management system that maps such a description into a deployment model. We have based our prototype on OpenStack and have identified some shortcomings of it that need to be overcome to make an automated resilience-aware deployment and operation system reality.