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…
SDxCentral raised an interesting point in an article on how Nokia thinks operators would use savings created by virtualization and automation. The point is that operators, having saved on both opex and capex with these strategies, would then spend more on innovation. I believe that the potential for this shift exists, but I also think…
You might be wondering whether perhaps NFV is getting a second wind. The fact that Verizon is looking at adopting ONAP, whose key piece is rival AT&T’s ECOMP, is a data point. Amdocs’ ONAP-based NFV strategy is another. Certainly there is still interest among many operators in making NFV work, but we still have two…
Comcast has started to push in earnest at business services with SD-WAN, and they’re far from the only play in the space. In fact, one question that’s now being raised in the space is whether the future of SD-WAN will be tied more to service providers than to CPE products bought directly by enterprises, or…
Everyone wants service lifecycle automation, which some describe as a “closed-loop” of event-to-action triggering, versus an open loop where humans have to link conditions to action. At one level, the desire for lifecycle automation is based on the combined problem of reducing opex and improving service agility. At another level, it’s based on the exploding…
According to AT&T, 5G will promote low-latency edge computing. Is this another of the 5G exaggerations we’ve seen for the last couple of years? Perhaps there is a relationship that’s not direct and obvious. We’ll see. This is a two-part issue, with the first part being whether low latency really matters that much, and the…