Ciena’s Blue Planet division is now using containers within its network orchestration software for service providers.

Its new architecture, launched today at the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, puts software functions within containers to enable software defined networking (SDN) management and control and network functions virtualization (NFV) orchestration. The new architecture also makes it possible for service providers to add their own services.

“We’ve moved from a monolithic software design to a microservices architecture where each function is broken down into small features," says Joe Cumello, VP of marketing for Blue Planet (formerly Cyan Inc.). "Recently, AT&T said it was building its NFV on Docker containers. That was very serendipitous for us. Customers have made it clear they want to be able to get into our software and change it if they need to.”

Cumello was referring to an August AT&T blog where the carrier explained that it was going to use containers and microservices. Blue Planet's two big customers are other notable service providers: CenturyLink and Colt.

BluePlanet’s software now also includes a path compute element that dictates how a service gets routed. “There might be a customer that has regulatory requirements that builds its own path compute,” says Cumello. “They can unplug our path compute element and our microservices container and plug in their own if they need to.”

Blue Planet is also employing open source Tosca templates so its customers can do some reprogramming of their services. In the past, if a customer wanted to change a service, it had to request a software services change.

Finally, Blue Planet says network operators have been having a problem connecting their virtual functions to their back office because of a lack of standardization. Blue Planet’s new support for the business process model and notation (BPMN) standard aims to solve that.