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Project XOS: An Update

Aug 27, 2018
Timon Sloane
Timon Sloane About the author

XOS provides a framework to define a set of declarative models and use them to manage the collection of components that have been configured into an operational system. XOS is itself deployed as a set of micro-services, collectively forming a ControlPlane-as-a-Service that:

  • Serves as a single unifying interface to a collection of backend services, avoiding the management silos that otherwise result from disaggregation. This includes a framework for creating and operating on services across organizational boundaries, across a range of implementations, and across multiple tenants.
  • Implements end-to-end service chains across a service mesh, supporting visibility and control at the granularity of individual subscribers. This provides a fine-grain means to correlate diagnostic and monitoring information, allocate resources and isolate performance, and distribute/migrate functionality.

Use Cases

XOS is being used in three projects:

  • CORD Controller → XOS is a central part of CORD, providing a coherent service control plane that runs on on top of a mix of legacy services running in VMs, micro-services running in containers, SDN control applications, and access technologies.
  • Network Edge Mediator (NEM) → XOS is being used to provide a mediation layer for SEBA (Software-Enabled Broadband Access), simplifying the challenge of integrating an edge site with different operators’ global orchestrators and legacy OSSs.
  • End-to-End Service Chains in a Multi-Cloud → XOS is being used to manage end-to-end service chains that span customer premises, edge sites, and commodity clouds.

Project Roadmap

A stable release of XOS is included in CORD 6.0. It includes a modeling language (xproto), a tool chain used to generate code that enforces the models on an operational system (xosgenx), a set of core model definitions for service meshes and service chains, and a set of helm-charts that define how to deploy an XOS-based control plane.

Work is underway to fully integrate XOS with Kubernetes in support of lifecycle management. Kubernetes is responsible for deploying, scaling, and managing micro-services, and XOS is responsible for constructing a distributed/heterogeneous service mesh and instantiating fine-grain service chains across the mesh on behalf of individual users.

Learn More

Click here to learn more about XOS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Timon Sloane
Timon SloaneVP, Marketing & Ecosystem
Timon Sloane is the vice president of marketing and ecosystem of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). He leads the organization’s efforts building an open source ecosystem, thus helping to enable broad transformation of the networking industry through the adoption open source business practices.

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