We are seeing more signs of the fiber challenge and opportunity, and more uncertainty about how it will play out, especially in terms of winners and losers. Ciena continues to take sensible steps, Infinera continues to stumble, and making sense of these seeming contradictions is the challenging part of assessing fiber’s future. It’s not like…
IoT has been contending for the most-hyped technology of our time, and a recent T3C Summit event that cause got a big boost. According to SDxCentral’s summary of a panel at the event, “…it makes sense that in the Internet of Things (IoT) boom, with its expected 20 billion to 50 billion connected devices by…
Suppose we decided that it was time to think outside the virtual CPE box, NFV-wise. The whole of NFV seems to have fixated on the vCPE story, so much so that it’s fair to ask whether there’s anything else for NFV to address, and if so what exactly would the other options look like. vCPE…
How do you know that software or software architectures are doing the wrong thing? Answer: They are doing something that only works in specific cases. That seems to be a problem with NFV software, including the current front-runner framework, ONAP. The initial release, we’re told by Light Reading, will support a limited set of vCPE…
The notion of stateless microservices for networking and the cloud is hardly new. I introduced some of the broad points on state in my blog last week, but the notion is much older. Twitter pioneered the concepts, and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all deployed web services to support the model, which is aimed at…
It’s time we spent a bit more time on the subject of “state”, not in a governmental sense but in the way that software elements behave, or should behave. State, in a distributed system, is everything. The term “state” is used in software design to indicate the notion of context, meaning where you are in…
Intel says it will simplify NFV by creating reference NFVIs. Is there a need for simplification with NFV, and does Intel’s move actually address it in the optimum way? It depends on what you think NFV is and what NFVI is, and sadly there’s not full accord on that point. It also depends on where…
We seem to be entering the fog again, at least in computing, and in a PR sense. Just this week we’ve had a half-dozen media stories on fog and edge computing, but none of them really look at the issue fully. There are, for certain, a lot of drivers for moving compute functionality to the…
A lot of important relationships in networking aren’t obvious, and that is the case with the relationship between management system boundaries, models, and elements of infrastructure. Those relationships can be critical in service lifecycle management, which in turn is critical to sustaining operator profit-per-bit and driving or supporting “innovations” like SDN or NFV. In my…
Service lifecycle automation is absolutely critical to operator transformation plant, but frankly it’s in a bit of a disorderly state. Early on, we presumed that services were built by sending an order to a monolithic system that processed the order and deployed the necessary assets. This sort-of-worked for deployment, but it didn’t handle service lifecycles…