The Master Service Orchestrator (MSO) is a key part of AT&T’s Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy (Ecomp) framework, according to a blog written today by Chaker Al-Hakim, assistant vice president of AT&T Ecomp.

The MSO’s primary function is the automation of end-to-end service instance provisioning. To do this, the MSO creates an OpenStack template called Heat.

“To populate the Heat template, MSO works with the software-defined networking (SDN) controller to retrieve a complete description of the networks and service being instantiated,” writes Al-Hakim.

The MSO then calculates the compute requirements for the virtual network function (VNF) and creates the storage topology for the VNF. The data elements reserved for the VNF are stored into another Ecomp component called Active and Available Inventory (A&AI).

According to Al-Hakim:

Once A&AI is successfully updated, MSO packages all the data into a template and uses the specific cloud interface to send the template to the cloud infrastructure. When the cloud infrastructure receives the template from MSO, it executes the instructions specified by MSO within the template. Finally, the cloud infrastructure returns an acknowledgement back to MSO to indicate the successfully [sic] onboarding of the VNF and availability of the new services.

"MSO is a key component to make sure you have everything necessary to do the task that a service provider needs in the automation area,” according to Chris Rice, VP of advanced technologies and architecture at AT&T Labs, who spoke with SDxCentral about Ecomp in March.

But Rice stressed that the MSO is working in unison with a cloud platform.

“For AT&T or any service provider to deliver on the promise of NFV and  SDN there’s got to be a way for them to take that software for particular functions and place it into the network in a way that then connects to other things," Rice said. "The system that does that is Ecomp. It takes a design for assets of a VNF, places it on a network cloud in an automated way, and allows it to run at scale.”