Autoscaling with VCCAP and StableNet^®

What is VCCAP? Already in 2013, Dimension Data decided to get involved in new and upcoming application virtualization concepts for Service Providers. The Virtualized Carrier Core Application Platform (VCCAP) was born to combine IaaS with SDN under the hood of ETSI-NFV concepts. Dimension Data selected best-of-breed hardware from their different vendors and followed open standards to build their infrastructure. They are using OpenStack as Virtual Infrastructure Management Layer and different service orchestrators for application onboardings and lifecycle management. The entire setup is hosted in their data center in Frankfurt. For a showcase at TM Forum Digital Transformation World in Nice, Infosim^® added StableNet^® to VCCAP to illustrate how to manage carrier grade environments based on the ETSI-NFV framework.

Demonstrated live in Nice, the PoC showed how StableNet^® can be used in cloud environments to monitor web application load and adapt to changing conditions so that applications can adapt to them. Among others, the following use case was shown: Web application was rolled out in a fully automated fashion in OpenStack private cloud. Bulk of HTTP GET requests was generated with stepwise increasing load profile by IXIA IxLoad. StableNet^® was provisioned to monitor the load of application and instructed by a business logic script to detects it and to triggers scale out. This logic was also designed to free up resources as soon as traffic load dropped.