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Asset Lifecycle Management and Operations: A Problem Statement
draft-palmero-ivy-ps-almo-02

Document Type Active Internet-Draft (individual)
Authors Marisol Palmero , Frank Brockners , Sudhendu Kumar , Camilo Cardona , Diego Lopez
Last updated 2024-07-08
Replaces draft-palmero-opsawg-ps-almo
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draft-palmero-ivy-ps-almo-02
IVY Working Group                                             M. Palmero
Internet-Draft                                              F. Brockners
Intended status: Informational                             Cisco Systems
Expires: 9 January 2025                                         S. Kumar
                                                     NC State University
                                                              C. Cardona
                                                                     NTT
                                                                D. Lopez
                                                          Telefonica I+D
                                                             8 July 2024

     Asset Lifecycle Management and Operations: A Problem Statement
                      draft-palmero-ivy-ps-almo-02

Abstract

   This document presents a problem statement for assets lifecycle
   management and operations.  It describes a framework, the motivation
   and requirements for asset-centric metrics including but not limited
   to, asset adoption, usability, entitlements, supported capabilities,
   and enabled capabilities.  The document also defines an information
   model.  The primary objective for this problem statement document is
   to validate and prove that the framework can measure and improve the
   network operators' experience along the lifecycle journey, from
   technical requirements and technology selection through renewal,
   including the end of life of an asset.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on 9 January 2025.

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
   license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
   Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
   and restrictions with respect to this document.  Code Components
   extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
   described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Motivation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  Sample Use Cases  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     4.1.  Entitlement Inventory and Activation  . . . . . . . . . .   7
     4.2.  Risk Mitigation Check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     4.3.  Bug Fixes and Errata  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     4.4.  Security Advisory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     4.5.  Optimal Software Version  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       4.5.1.  Software Conformance  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       4.5.2.  What-if Analysis  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     4.6.  Asset Retirement - End of Life  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   5.  ALMO Information Model  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   Change log  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13

1.  Introduction

   The virtualization of hardware assets and the development of
   applications using microservice architectures for cloud-native
   infrastructures triggered new utilization and licensing models.  For
   example, a service can be deployed by composing multiple assets
   together; where an asset refers to hardware, software, application,
   system or another service.  Also, services can be instantiated on-
   demand.  As an example, cloud-native services from one vendor may be
   hosted on the physical server from another vendor or a combination of
   multiple cloud-native functions from one or more vendors can be
   combined to execute a composite service.

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   Such dynamicity introduces challenges for both lifecycle and adoption
   management of the assets.  For example, an operator may need to
   identify the capability availability of different assets or measure
   the usage of each capability (or the combination thereof) from any
   specific asset to measure, e.g., its optimal potential.  Moreover, an
   operator could pinpoint the reason of this non-nominal use of an
   asset, e.g., the software application could not be optimally deployed
   because is not simple to use, or the usage is not well documented,
   etc.  The operator may then feed this information back to the support
   teams and the software developers, so they can focus their work
   effort only on features that users are adopting, or even determine
   when the lifecycle of the development could end.

   This creates the need to collect and analyze asset-centric lifecycle
   management and operations data.  This data is referred to as Asset
   Lifecycle Management and Operations (ALMO).  Note that ALMO is not
   limited to virtualized or cloud environments, it covers all types of
   networking environments in which technology assets are deployed.  No
   assumption is made about which technology is used to implement an
   asset.

   ALMO data is the set of data required to measure asset-centric
   lifecycle metrics including, but not limited to, asset adoption and
   usability, entitlement, supported capabilities , and enabled
   capabilities.

   The main challenge in collecting ALMO data, especially in a
   multivendor environment, is the ability to produce and consume such
   data in a vendor-agnostic, consistent, and synchronized way.  Another
   challenge is to maintain/cleanup the data (e.g., update it with
   external data such as End of Support (EoS)).

   This document describes the motivation for ALMO, lists sample use
   cases, followed by an ALMO information model.  The use cases motivate
   the need for new functional blocks and their interactions.  The
   current version of this document focuses on assets, entitlement
   information, features, and feature's usage.  A more specific document
   will follow this reference with the specification of the YANG data
   model for the specific four modules [RFC7950].

   This document aims extend and provide a snapshot of the data model
   draft's purpose, the issues it tackles, and the manner in which it
   approaches the problem, all while being concise and summarizing the
   key points from the more detailed future scope section.

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2.  Terminology

   The document makes use of the following terms:

   *  Asset: refers to hardware, software, applications, or services.
      An asset can be physical or virtual.  The granularity of what
      constitutes an asset is deployment and implementation specific.

   *  Consumer: refers to an entity that utilizes the ALMO data.  A
      consumer can be an operator, an asset developer, or some other
      interested third party.  Also, network controllers or
      orchestrators may be considered as consumers under some
      conditions.

   *  Developer: refers to the entity that creates or develops an asset
      or an asset component.

   *  Features: are options or functional capabilities offered by an
      asset.

   *  Entitlement: commonly implemented as license; it represents the
      rights obtained by the user, that allow them to access and utilize
      certain capabilities of the asset, including a feature or set of
      features.

   *  Event report: refers to record of details of an incident that an
      operator reports, e.g., a trouble ticket.

   *  Lifecycle Management and Operations (LMO) connects to:

   1.  Assets as a generalized entity subject to LCM.

   2.  Entitlements as the essential policy root for LCM.

   3.  Metrics as the evidence for LCM transitions.

   4.  Reports (no incidents) as the way of collecting input from users.

   *  Optimal Software Version (OSV): refers to the elected software
      version considered optimal in the consumer environment.

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   *  Operator: refers to the owner or consumer of the asset.  An
      operator belongs to an organization.  Within the organization
      there are entities that use the assets in their operations and
      those who manage the assets.  For example, supply chain and risk
      management teams will also be operators by running “what-if”
      scenarios to anticipate decommissioning operations or assess the
      impact of component exhaustion, etc.  This document uses the terms
      "user" and "operator" interchangeably.

   *  Usage: refers to how an asset is being used (e.g., which features
      are used).

   *  User Experience: how a user interacts with and experiences a
      particular asset.  It includes a user's perceptions of ease of
      use, efficiency, and utility of an asset.

   Abbreviations:

   *  ALMO: Asset Lifecycle Management and Operations

   *  EOL: End of Life

   *  EoS: End of Support

   *  LCM: Lifecycle Management

   *  PID: Product Identifier

3.  Motivation

   The operator experience with a specific asset can be organized into
   four classes:

   1.  Asset characteristic class: covering a set of data that
       characterize an asset, entitlement, features, etc.

   2.  Utilization class: measuring how the assets, including the
       features, are used, duration of usage, uptime, etc.

   3.  Notification class: covering any security advisory, retirement,
       etc.

   4.  Incident class: recording and reporting problems that an operator
       has faced with an asset.

   The ability to measure, produce, and consume ALMO data could benefit
   the operator in addressing issues such as:

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   *  Entitlements may not have been obtained at the nominal level of
      usage for a given asset or feature, where a user might have bought
      entitlements that are not activated.  Defining a nominal level is
      local to each deployment.

   *  Features of an asset might not be used as needed in all
      deployments within the organization and for various reasons.

   *  Resolution of incidents involving an asset and the developer of a
      technology used within the asset.

   *  Optimal and correct form of entitlements have not been purchased
      for virtualized asset lifecycle events, such as scaling or
      migration.

   *  Softwares versions go out of conformance; ALMO data can help in
      facilitating DevOps deployment, including automated testing,
      validation, pre-production, production, and certification

   *  Supply chain disruption; ALMO data can help with a link to supply
      chain management and/or connect it with the provenance
      information.

   ALMO could help developer organizations to optimize their features.
   For example, they could consider deprecating features that are used
   infrequently, focus on introducing more features for the assets that
   are widely deployed in various infrastructures, or adjust the design
   to better ease usability or ease integration, etc.

   ALMO provides a structured approach for users to provide feedback
   about an asset (e.g., potential deficiency of a feature, feature
   enhancement request, inadequacy of a usage-based license model).  An
   administrator in the user organization may define and thus include
   specific metrics that identify a potential problem of a specific
   asset feature . A developer can determine the impact of the potential
   deficiency from the number of users providing feedback or the amount/
   periodicity of feedback (e.g., enrollment, updates).  Note that this
   channel is different from a "call to a Technical Assistance Center"
   in which the user may request help in resolving specific operational
   issues with the asset.

4.  Sample Use Cases

   This section presents some use cases where ALMO is useful.

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4.1.  Entitlement Inventory and Activation

   An Operator team would like to understand which entitlements are
   activated and which are being used, or consumed.  It is also
   important for asset operators to understand which features might need
   an entitlement and how to activate them.

   It is relatively straightforward to have an inventory of existing
   entitlements when there is only one asset developer (providing the
   asset) and one asset family.

   But complexity grows when there are many different developers,
   systems and processes involved.  New service offerings have
   introduced new attributes and datasets and require alignment with new
   business models (pay-per-product, subscription model, pay-as-you-go
   model, etc.).  They might support different entitlement types and
   models: asset activation keys, trust-based model, systems that act as
   proxy from the back end owned by the asset developer to support the
   control of entitlements, etc.

   Sometimes it is a challenge to report which entitlements have been
   bought by the asset user, or who in the user organization owns that
   entitlement because that information might rely on different asset
   developers; even within the same asset developer, entitlements may
   correspond to different types or groups of assets.  Asset users often
   need to interact with different entitlement systems and processes.

   Information on how assets are entitled could be delivered from a
   combination of attributes such as: sales order, purchase order, asset
   activation key, serial number, etc.

   If there is no consistency on how to deal with those data points,
   complexity increases for the consumer, potentially requiring
   expensive manual procedures to correlate information.  Automating
   those steps or exceptions becomes time-consuming, eventually leading
   to higher costs for the asset consumer.

   Having a common ALMO reference eases the integration between
   different data sources, processes, and consolidation of the
   information under a common reference.

   The ALMO information model and companion data models will include
   data to support metrics that might be required by consumption-based
   charging and entitlement of asset usage.

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4.2.  Risk Mitigation Check

   Asset operators require tracking issues known by the asset developer
   that are causing assets to crash or perform badly so that they can
   act to remediate the issue quickly, or even prevent the crash if
   alerts are triggered on time.  There are analytics tools that can
   process memory core dumps and crash-related files, providing the
   ability to the asset developers to determine the root cause.

   Accordingly, asset users can remediate the problem, automate the
   remedy to enable incident deflection, allowing the support staff to
   focus on other problems.

   Risk Mitigation Check (RMC) could also include the possibility to be
   aware of current and historical restarts allowing network and
   software engineers to enhance the service quality to asset users.
   Also RMC could run what-if scenarios to identify which assets would
   be impacted when a certain component is faulty.

4.3.  Bug Fixes and Errata

   Both hardware and software critical issues or Errata need development
   to automate asset user matching:

   *  Hardware Errata match on product identifiers (PIDs) + serial
      numbers along with additional hardware attributes.

   *  Software Errata match on software type and software version along
      with some additional device attributes.

   Engineering might develop the logic to check whether any critical
   issue applies to a single serial number or a specific software
   release.

   The information to be correlated includes customer identification,
   activated features, and asset information that the asset user might
   own.  All this information needs to be correlated with hardware and
   software errata, and EOL information to show which part of the asset
   inventory might be affected.

4.4.  Security Advisory

   The Security Advisory use case automates the matching of asset user
   data to security bulletins published by asset developers.
   Security Advisory logic implemented by developers could apply to a
   specific software release.

   This is a specific use case of Section 4.3.

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4.5.  Optimal Software Version

   The objective of the Optimal Software Version (OSV) use case is that
   consumers can mark software images as OSV for their assets; based on
   this, it is easier for them to control and align their hardware and
   software assets to the set of OSVs.

   Based on the logic of OSV, use cases like software compliance, risk
   trend analysis, acknowledge bugs, security advisories, errata, what-
   if analysis, etc., could be realized.

4.5.1.  Software Conformance

   All the assets should normally be running at their latest recommended
   software version; notably in case of a required security update for a
   specific feature.  The recommended version may be a decision of the
   vendor or the operator.

   The Software Conformance use case provides a view to the asset users
   and informs the users whether the assets that belong to a specific
   group conforms to the OSV.  It can provide the users with a report,
   including a representation of software compliance for the entire
   network and software applications.  This report could include the
   current software version running on the asset and the recommended
   software version.  The report could enable users to quickly highlight
   which group of assets might need the most attention to inspire
   appropriate actions.

   The Software Conformance use case uses data that might not be
   provided by the asset itself.  Data needs to be provided and
   maintained also by the asset developers, through e.g., asset catalog
   information.  Similar logic applies to a feature catalog, where the
   asset developer maintains the data and updates it adequately based on
   existing bugs, security advisories, etc.

   The Software Conformance process needs to correlate the software
   catalog information with the software version running on the asset.

4.5.2.  What-if Analysis

   The What-if Analysis use case allows asset users to plan for new
   hardware or software, giving them the possibility to change the
   configuration parameters or model how new hardware or software might
   change the software suggestions generated by OSV.

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   OSV and the associated use cases involve dependencies on attributes
   that might need to be collected from assets directly, including
   related inventory information (serial numbers, asset identifiers,
   software versions, etc.), but also dynamic information could be
   required, like:

   *  Information on features that might be enabled on the particular
      asset.

   *  Catalogs, that might include information related to release notes.
      For example, consider a feature catalog.  This catalog could
      include software versions that support a specific feature; the
      software releases that a feature is supported in; or the latest
      version that a feature is supported in, in case the feature is
      EOL.

   *  Data sources to correlate information coming from reports on
      critical issues or errata, security advisory, End of Life, etc.

   Those catalogs and data sources with errata information, EOL, etc.
   need to be maintained and updated by asset developers, making sure,
   that the software running on the assets is safe to run and up to
   date.

4.6.  Asset Retirement - End of Life

   Hardware EOL reports need to map Hardware EOL PIDs, focusing on base
   PIDs so that bundles, spares, non-base PIDs, etc., do not provide
   false EOL reporting to asset users.

   Software EOL reports are used to automate the matching of user
   software type and software version to software EOL bulletins.

5.  ALMO Information Model

   The broad metric classes defined in Section 3 that quantify user
   experience can be modeled as shown in Figure 1.  There is a reference
   to the assets that the user possesses.  Each asset may be entitled to
   one or more entitlements; an entitlement may contain one or more sub-
   entitlements.  The level of usage for each feature and entitlement
   associated with the asset is measured.

   For example, a user needs to measure the utilization of a specific
   entitlement for a specific type of asset.  The information about the
   entitlement may reside in an entitlement server.  The state
   (activated or not) of the entitlement may reside with the asset
   itself or a proxy.  They can be aggregated/correlated as per the
   information model shown in Figure 1 to give information to the user

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   regarding the utilization of the entitlements.  The user experience
   is thus enhanced by having accurate knowledge about the utility of
   the given entitlement.

       +------entitled_by/entitles------+
       |                                |
       V                                V
   +-------------+               +------------+    +-------------+
   | Entitlement |               |   Feature  |<-->|    Usage    |
   |             |<----+   +---->+            |    +-------------+
   +-------------+     |   |     +------------+    |             |
   | Entitlement |     |   |     |   Feature  |    |    Usage    |
   | attributes  |     |   |     | attributes |    |  attributes |
   +-------------+     |   |     +------------+    +-------------+
           entitled_by/|   |
             entitles  |   | tracked_by/
                       |   |   tracks
                   +---v---v-------+              +---------------+
                   |     Asset     +<------------>|     Future    |
                   +---------------+    future_   |    Expansion  |
                   |     Asset     |  association +---------------+
                   |   attributes  |
                   +---------------+

                      Figure 1: ALMO Information Model

   To simplify the information model diagram, it has not been included a
   representation that considers assets, to be defined by other assets;
   as well as entitlements and features.  Entitlements could be
   considered as a composition of one of more entitlements, and a
   feature could also be part of other features.  The model allows for
   future expansion by new metrics that will quantify user experience.
   Notice that future association relationship and future expansion
   might be linked to asset or to one of the other datasets: Feature,
   Feature Usage or Entitlements.

6.  Security Considerations

   ALMO will bring several security and privacy implications because of
   the various components and attributes when defining the YANG modules
   of the information model.  For example, each functional component can
   be tampered with to give manipulated data.  ALMO when used alone or
   with other relevant data, can identify an individual, revealing
   personal data.  Misconfigurations can lead to data being accessed by
   unauthorized entities.

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   The transport entity of the functional model must implement methods
   for secure transport.  This document also contains an Information
   model in which some of the objects defined are writable.  If the
   objects are deemed sensitive in a particular environment, access to
   them must be restricted using appropriately configured security and
   access control rights.  Appropriate authentication and audit
   procedures must be in place for all the consumers of ALMO.

Change log

   RFC Editor Note: This section is to be removed during the final
   publication of the document.

   version 02

   *  Syntactical changes has been applied.

   version 01

   *  Introduce a Scope section, that will tackle key points to consider
      when defining the corresponding YANG data models and how to relate
      them.

   version 00

   *  Reference to [I-D.draft-palmero-opsawg-dmlmo-10] draft and
      [I-D.draft-palmero-opsawg-ps-almo-00], looking to simplify the
      objective and understanding of it, with focus on the framework and
      the main functional models, reducing scope to assets, features,
      usage and entitlements; with special highlight to the
      interrelation between them.

   *  Work moved to IVY working group.

Acknowledgments

   The authors wish to thank Martin Beverley, Mohamed Boucadair, Ignacio
   Dominguez Martinez-Casanueva and Gonzalo Salgueiro (by alphabetical
   order) for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Contributors

   This document was created by meaningful contributions (by
   alphabetical order) from Shwetha Bhandari, Yenu Gobena, Nagendra
   Kumar Nainar, Jan Lindblad, Josh Suhr, Dhiren Tailor, Yannis
   Viniotis, and Éric Vyncke.

Informative References

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   [I-D.draft-palmero-opsawg-dmlmo-10]
              Palmero, M., Brockners, F., Kumar, S., Bhandari, S.,
              Cardona, C., and D. Lopez, "Data Model for Lifecycle
              Management and Operations", Work in Progress, Internet-
              Draft, draft-palmero-opsawg-dmlmo-10, 7 July 2023,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-palmero-
              opsawg-dmlmo-10>.

   [I-D.draft-palmero-opsawg-ps-almo-00]
              Palmero, M., Brockners, F., Kumar, S., Cardona, C., and D.
              Lopez, "Asset Lifecycle Management and Operations, Problem
              Statement", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-
              palmero-opsawg-ps-almo-00, 29 June 2023,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-palmero-
              opsawg-ps-almo-00>.

   [RFC7950]  Bjorklund, M., Ed., "The YANG 1.1 Data Modeling Language",
              RFC 7950, DOI 10.17487/RFC7950, August 2016,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7950>.

Authors' Addresses

   Marisol Palmero
   Cisco Systems
   Email: mpalmero@cisco.com

   Frank Brockners
   Cisco Systems
   Email: fbrockne@cisco.com

   Sudhendu Kumar
   NC State University
   Email: skumar23@ncsu.edu

   Camilo Cardona
   NTT
   Email: camilo@ntt.net

   Diego Lopez
   Telefonica I+D
   Email: diego.r.lopez@telefonica.com

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