Microservices Architecture¶

The NOC is built atop Microservice Architecture. Atomic parts of NOC are microservices (or simply services) - small processes performing their own task. Microservices have following properties:

• Each service performs only one particular task
• Each service has well-defined contract (interface offered to other services)
• Services are simple
• Service can request other services
• New services can be added without inflicting existing ones
• Each service has determined resource requirements, including CPU, RAM, disk space and IOPS. This offer transparent scaling process according to your workload.

NOC groups services to following groups:

• Storage services - databases and file storages holding NOC state or context. The state must survive between restarts. Only storage services are allowed to write on disk. Other services has no global context and may be moved between the nodes of cluster.
• UI services - backend for user interface
• Pool services - interacts with network. Several pools can be deployed to deal with different parts of network.
• Integration Services - a barrier between the NOC and the external world. Services like nbi and datastream offer integration interfaces to access NOC data and perform basic operations initiated by external systems. Other services can request various external systems to reach the seamless integration.
• External Services - NOC part of NOC itself. Various existing systems that can provide services for NOC or use NOC services by themselves.

Top level overview of NOC is on the picture below:

Despite the common belief that microservice architecture is hard to configure and maintain, NOC provides management tool, called Tower to configure and deploy whole cluster. Tower provided with complex Ansible playbook to hide all deployment complexity under the hood.

Microservices offer great flexibility, allowing adjust amount of launched instances according your workload providing effective resource utilisation.