Follow up to "has virtualization become obsolete in 5G"?
Hello folks, Last year, I posted to this list and asked "has virtualization become obsolete in 5G"? A similar opinion seems to be gaining ground <https://www.telecomtvperspectives.com/series/vmware/the-countdown-to-5g-and-cloud-native/> .: "Once the darling of the telecoms industry, NFV has had a rough ride in recent years and has even lead some industry observers to proclaim that NFV is dead." Cheers, Etienne -- Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale Assistant Lecturer Department of Communications & Computer Engineering Faculty of Information & Communication Technology University of Malta Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
The amount of buzzwords in that page is quite incredible. I'm also unsure where it mentions that virtualization is now obsolete. NFV solutions are moving to VM based deployments as a stop-gap and for the future, towards micro-services built in containers. On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 6:38 AM Etienne-Victor Depasquale <edepa@ieee.org> wrote:
Hello folks,
Last year, I posted to this list and asked "has virtualization become obsolete in 5G"?
A similar opinion seems to be gaining ground <https://www.telecomtvperspectives.com/series/vmware/the-countdown-to-5g-and-cloud-native/> .:
"Once the darling of the telecoms industry, NFV has had a rough ride in recent years and has even lead some industry observers to proclaim that NFV is dead."
Cheers,
Etienne
-- Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale Assistant Lecturer Department of Communications & Computer Engineering Faculty of Information & Communication Technology University of Malta Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
I'm also unsure where it mentions that virtualization is now obsolete.
"Obsolete" was my term. The substance of my question last year was my surprise in observing what appeared to be a trend that virtualization technologies (KVM, Xen, Hyper-V ...) are no longer the first choice for implementation of network functions. Since then, every opportunity I've had to listen to operators, operators' groups, vendors and analysts has reaffirmed the preference of containerization technologies for implementation of network functions (NFs). What struck me in particular in the link I've shared is the extract I quoted: "Once the darling of the telecoms industry, NFV has had a rough ride in recent years and has even lead some industry observers to proclaim that NFV is dead." NFV solutions are moving to VM based deployments as a stop-gap and for the
future, towards micro-services built in containers.
Agreed ... except that some "industry observers" may link NFV exclusively to virtualization technologies. I don't. However, in their favour, I'd dare say that it's not technically sound to blur the technical differences between NFs implemented in VMs and NFs implemented in containers. The term NFV is a bit of a stretch for what is really network-function-containerization. Cheers, Etienne On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 1:57 AM Laurent Dumont <laurentfdumont@gmail.com> wrote:
The amount of buzzwords in that page is quite incredible.
I'm also unsure where it mentions that virtualization is now obsolete. NFV solutions are moving to VM based deployments as a stop-gap and for the future, towards micro-services built in containers.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 6:38 AM Etienne-Victor Depasquale <edepa@ieee.org> wrote:
Hello folks,
Last year, I posted to this list and asked "has virtualization become obsolete in 5G"?
A similar opinion seems to be gaining ground <https://www.telecomtvperspectives.com/series/vmware/the-countdown-to-5g-and-cloud-native/> .:
"Once the darling of the telecoms industry, NFV has had a rough ride in recent years and has even lead some industry observers to proclaim that NFV is dead."
Cheers,
Etienne
-- Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale Assistant Lecturer Department of Communications & Computer Engineering Faculty of Information & Communication Technology University of Malta Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
-- Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale Assistant Lecturer Department of Communications & Computer Engineering Faculty of Information & Communication Technology University of Malta Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
Etienne-Victor Depasquale wrote on 16/01/2021 11:34:
The term NFV is a bit of a stretch for what is really network-function-containerization.
Like ~ everything else relating to computers, network management and service provisioning functionality boils down to executing CPU instructions on physical devices with service access handles and protocols available over a management communications layer. There are plenty of choice about what particular abstraction layer you might want to sit between between the storage image and the CPU. Containers have been around for years, and have some advantages over hypervisor-based virtual machines, in relation to cost and deployment efficiency. Like everything else, there's a tradeoff, and the suitability of containers to the function at hand depends on what you're trying to achieve. The reaction of most technical people to deployment of NFV or declaration of NFV's death is going to be more along the lines of wondering why telco proponents were so late to the devops / containerisation game to start with, and what on earth did they think was so innovative about it that it deserved yet another marketing label. Nick
participants (3)
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Etienne-Victor Depasquale -
Laurent Dumont -
Nick Hilliard