Building scalable cloud applications as a collection of micro-services is a promising approach to NFV Orchestration. This is because micro-services are well established as the cornerstone of DevOps, which operators see as a path to improving agility. But organizing a collection of VNFs as micro-services is not sufficient. There are two issues. The first is that micro-services assume a single domain of trust, but network operators must accommodate multiple actors. The second is that micro-services isolate information, but orchestration requires global visibility across a set of micro-services. This talk describes a service control plane that is layered on top of a collection of micro-services to address these two limitations. In addition to describing the role of a service control plane, this talk reports our experiences implementing and using a service control plane in CORD.
