Gray Ken - Network Function Virtualization

1. Tables in Chapter 7

1. Figures in Chapter 1
2. Figures in Chapter 2
3. Figures in Chapter 3
4. Figures in Chapter 4
5. Figures in Chapter 5
6. Figures in Chapter 6
7. Figures in Chapter 7
8. Figures in Chapter 8

Ken Gray

Director, CTO and Architecture Group, Cisco Systems

Thomas D. Nadeau

Chief Architect, Open Source and Distinguished Engineer, Brocade Communications Systems

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Dave Ward

Lift and Shift Is Necessary but not Sufficient

This book by Ken and Tom on Network Function Virtualization is perhaps the first time they have laid out both a fantastic review of the vast landscape of technologies related to virtualized networking, and woven in a subtle argument and allusion to what the future of this technology holds. I may be drunk on my own Koolaid, but I certainly read the book with a specific lens in which I asked the question Where are we on the maturity continuum of the technology and how close is it to what operators and customers need or want to deploy? The answer I believe I read from Tom and Ken is that Weve only just begun. (Now try and get Karen Carpenter out of your head while reading the rest of this ). What I mean by this is that over the last say 6 years of trade-rag-eye-ball-seeking articles, the industry has lived through huge hype cycles and presumptive close arguments of download-install-transition-your-telco/mso to a whole new business.

What K/T lay out is not only an industry in transition but one that is completely dependent on the pace being set by the integration of huge open source projects and proprietary products, proprietary implementations of newly virtualized appliances, huge holes in the stack of SW required to make the business: resilient, anti-fragile, predictable, supportable, able to migrate across DCs, flexibly rearrangeable, a whole mess of additional x-ilities and most importantly operate-able and billable. This transition MUST happen for the industry and it MUST happen in many networking-dependent industries. Why? Because the dominant architecture of many SPs is one in which flexible data centers were not considered part of the service delivery network. On-demand user choice was not the norm. Therefore, trucking in a bunch of compute-storage-switching (aka data centers) does not by itself deliver a service. SPs build services in which there are SLAs (many by regulation in addition to service guarantees), guarantees of experience, giving access to any and all new devices that arrive on the market and as a goal focus on building more and more uses of their network. The key message this book lays out is that: its complex, there are a ton of moving parts, there are layers upon layers, there are very few peopleif in fact anythat can hold the entire architecture in their head and keep track of it. And most importantly; we are closer to the starting line than the finish line.

Thankfully as K/T have laid out in another book, we have made it through the SDN-hype cycle and its being rolled out across the industry. We watched the movie Rise of the Controllers and the industry is settled down and deploying the technology widely. Now we are to the point where virtualizing everything is the dominant topic. Technology progresses. It requires a lot of stack and all that is necessary in that stack does not exist today and is in various stages of completeness, but not integrated into something consistent or coherent yet. Also, when someone says VNF (virtualized network function) or NFV (network function virtualization): (1) it applies to more than networking related stuff, see video production and playout services and (2) the terms were defined when hypervisors where the only choice for virtualization. Now that containers are available; we have to clearly set the industry goal that cloud native (which is basically a synonym for containerized applications) is the ultimate endpoint; until the next wave comes in. The real point is that lifting and shifting of physical appliances to hypervisor based VNFs (necessary first step but not sufficient) led to one particular stack of technology, but cloud-native leads to a different variant. One in which use of DC resources is dramatically lower, time to boot/active service is faster and parallelism is the central premise. For the love of all the G*ds, I truly hope that the industry does not stall prematurely. Without knowing what Ken and Tom are up to next; its an easy prediction to make that this book will have a potential for 42 versions of publication as today it documents the first steps toward this industry revolution.