2021 Jul
The MEF Policy Driven Orchestration (PDO) standard specifies how Policy-based management and modeling can be used to realize and augment the orchestration functionality defined in the MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Reference Architecture (RA), MEF 55.1. It may also be used to define other types of services, such as choreography and collaboration.
This document defines what Policy is, how policy-based management is used in the LSO RA, some exemplary use cases, and architectural extensions to the LSO RA. This will enable policies to be exchanged across APIs as defined in MEF 55.1, including (but not limited to) Cantata, Allegro, and Sonata. Cantata and Allegro enable policy-based interaction between the Customer and the Provider, while Sonata is critical for policy-based interaction in a carrier supply chain.
The policy model defined in this document is developed from MEF 78.1 (i.e., the MEF Core Model, or MCM). This means that the top of the policy model (i.e., MCMPolicyObject) is a sub-class of the MCM.
This document uses modeling best practices, and a number of software patterns to provide an extensible framework that can support model-driven engineering [9] as well as the needs of DevOps-inspired automation. It defines concepts and functions that can be represented to define policies, as well as associated data, exchanged at all seven of the Interface Reference Points currently defined in MEF 55.1.
The policy model defined in this document is an object-oriented information model, and hence, is independent of any specific architectural paradigm (e.g., resource- or service-oriented architec-tures), protocol, or platform.
The policy model defined in this document can be used to represent a number of different types of policies, including (but not limited to) imperative, declarative, intent, and utility function policies. However, the focus of this document is on imperative and intent policies.
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