Motivation for the draft

[italobusi]

Describe the motivation for the network inventory YANG model

[jbouqui153]

Here a draft proposal for the Abstract and for the Introduction: Abstract: This document defines a generic YANG data model for network inventory data information to be used in PNCs' North Bound interface in ACTN architecture. This generic data model shall enable to be then augmented, when required, with technology specific inventory data for IP, Optical or MW networks.

Introduction: Network inventory management is a key component in operators' OSS architectures. In the draft-ietf-teas-actn-poi-applicability [POI] a gap was identified regarding the lack of a YANG data model that could be used at MPI interface level to report whole/partial HW inventory information available at PNC level towards north bound systems (e.g. MDSC or OSS layer). [RFC8345] initial goal was to make possible the augmentation of the YANG data model with network inventory data model but this was never developped and the scope was kept limited to network topology data only. It is key for operators to drive the industry towards the use of standard YANG data model for network inventory data instead of using, as per today, Vendors proprietary API (e.g. REST API) in PNCs' North Bound interface. In the ACTN architecture this would bring also clear benefits at MDSC level for packet over optical integration scenarios since this would enable to correlate the inventory information with the links information reported in the network topology model.

The intention, as mentioned previously, is to define a generic YANG data model that would be as much as possible transport technology agnostic (valid for IP/MPLS, optical and microwave) and that would be augmented, when required only, to include some missing HW inventory technology specific details.

[RFC8348] defines a YANG data model for HW management for PNC South Bound interface towards the network elements and it will be used as a reference model for defining the YANG network inventory data model in scope of this draft.

For optical network inventory data defined in this draft, it should be aligned with inventory use cases (4a and 4b) already part of ONF TR-548 T-API RIA v1.0 (Jul'20) implemented already by several Vendors' optical PNCs in order to guarantee a seamless integration at MDSC/OSS/orchestration layers, independently of the MPI choice (IETF ACTN or ONF T-API).

First step is to focus on generic YANG inventory data model and the required augmentations for optical PNC case. Packet PNC case will be cover in a later stage of the draft.

[italobusi]

While our target is to apply this model to the MPI, I would follow the same approach used for other IETF YANG models not to restrict its applicability to any specific architecture or interface.

The abstract could be:

This document defines a generic YANG data model for network inventory data information.
This generic data model can be augmented, when required, with technology-specific inventory data.

However, since the -00 version is limited to only optical network inventory, I would propose the following abstract for the -00 version (to be updated as proposed above in a future version).

@jbouqui153 , please check the text proposal for the -00 draft in https://github.com/italobusi/ietf-network-inventory/pull/5/commits/d3e30ac030906a9a6452f42ee289ab39adf01b30

We can further improve the text in future versions of the draft

[italobusi]

The current text is fine. It can be improved if there are comments.