The network of the future might have to evolve from the network of today, but it has to evolve and not take root there. Google has consistently looked first at the future, in network terms in particular, and only then worry about linking the future back to the present. Their latest announced concept, Expresso, has…
One of the questions certain to arise from discussions of service lifecycle management is how VNFs are managed. The pat answer to this is “similar to the way that the physical network functions (PNFs) that the VNFs replace were managed.” Actually, it’s not so pat a response, either. It is very desirable that management practices…
Picking the best approach to service modeling for lifecycle management is like picking the Final Four; there’s no shortage of strongly held opinions. This blog is my view, but as you’ll see I’m not going to war to defend my choice. I’ll lay out the needs, give my views, and let everyone make their own…
Service modeling has to start somewhere, and both the “normal” bottom-up approach and the software-centric top-down approach have their plusses and minuses. Starting at the bottom invites creating an implementation-specific approach that misses a lot of issues and benefits. Starting at the top ignores the reality that operators have an enormous sunk cost in network…
This is my third blog in my series on service management, and like the past two (on the resource layer and service layer) this one will take a practical-example focus to try to open more areas of discussion. I don’t recommend anyone read this piece without having read the other two blogs. The service layer…
Yesterday I talked about service transformation through lifecycle management, starting with how to expose traditional networking services and features through intent models. Today, I’m going to talk about the other side of the divide—service modeling. Later, we’ll talk about the boundary function between the two, and still later will take up other topics like how…
One of the challenges of transforming the way we do networking is the need for abstraction and the difficulty we experience in dealing with purely abstract things. What I’ll be doing over the next week or ten days (depending on what else comes up that warrants blogging) is looking at the process of building and…
There seem to be a lot of forces driving, suggesting, or inducing major changes in the networking industry. As indicators, we have mergers at the service provider, equipment vendor, and content provider level, and we have proposed breakups of hardware and software at the equipment level. Another hardware player broke itself to death, selling pieces…
Most of you know that I like the concept of a VNF platform as a service (VNFPaaS) as a mechanism for facilitating onboarding and expanding the pace of NFV deployment. That’s still true today, but I had some recent conversations with big network operators, and they tell me that it’s just not in the cards. …
I blogged about cable and telco broadband last week, which leaves us a third significant broadband source—satellite. The advantages of satellite broadband are obvious; you can get it anywhere in the world. The disadvantages have been equally obvious—higher cost and performance issues on at least some delay-sensitive applications. There are rumors that NFV or 5G…