Building Multi-Vendor T and E Systems in iNET

摘要

Despite their numerous benefits, T and E XML-based languages like MDL and TMATS do not address all of the challenges related to building multi-vendor T and E systems in a truly vendor-agnostic workflow. In particular, they cannot harness the complexity of constraints that may pertain to vendors' hardware or to express system-level constraints that span across entire networks of devices and differ across different users. We developed a concept of TACL -- a language for formulating constraints on configurations represented in MDL and TMATS. TACL is a backwards-compatible extension of the W3C Shape Constraints Language (SHACL). SHACL treats constraints as first-class citizens and facilitates building high-level domain-specific expressions resulting in constraints that closely resemble the user's intent and are not boggled with low-level data structures. A reference implementation of a TACL engine (xVISor) has been developed and integrated with the iNET System Manager. The resulting system is capable of fully configuring cross-vendor systems without relying on any vendor-provided software.