Open Source
to be deployed in any private, hybrid or public cloud. “We’re bringing the best of telecoms and the best of cloud technologies together. Containers, microservices, portability and ease of use are important for cloud. In telecoms, it’s high availability, scalability, and resiliency. These need to come together – and that’s the premise of the CNFs,” Arpit Joshipura, head of networking for The Linux Foundation, told DCD.
Application containers were created for cloud computing – hence, cloud-native. Kubernetes itself falls under the purview of another part of The Linux Foundation, the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a community that is increasingly interested in collaboration with LF Networking. “We started on this virtualization journey several years ago, looking at making everything programmable and softwaredefined,” Kirksey explained. “We began virtualizing a lot of the capabilities in the network. We did a lot of great work, but we started seeing issues here and there – to be honest, a lot of our early VNFs were just existing hardware code put into a VM. “Suddenly cloud-native comes on the scene, and there’s a lot of performance and efficiency gains that you can get from containerization, there’s a lot more density
– more services per core. Now we are rethinking applications based on cloudnative design patterns. We can leverage a wider pool of developers. Meanwhile the cloud-native folks are looking at networking – but most application developers don’t find networking all that interesting. They just want a pipe to exist. “With those trends of moving towards containerization and microservices, we started to think how cloud-native for NFV would look like.” One of the defining features of containers is they can be scaled easily: in periods of peak demand, just add more copies of the service. Another benefit is portability, since containers package all of the app’s dependencies in the same environment, which can then be moved between any cloud provider. Just like VNFs, multiple CNFs can be strung together to create advanced services, something called ‘service function chaining’ in the telecommunications world. But CNFs also offer improved resiliency: when individual containers fail, Kubernetes’ auto-scaling features mean they will be replaced immediately. The term ‘CNF’ is just a few months old, but it is catching on quickly: there’s
a certain industry buzz here, a common understanding that this technology could simultaneously modernize and simplify the network. Thomas Nadeau, technical director of NFV at Red Hat who literally wrote the book on the subject, told DCD: “When this all becomes containerized, it is very easy to build the applications that can run in these [cloud] environments. You can almost imagine an app store situation, like in OpenShift and Kubernetes today - there’s a catalogue of CNFs, and you just pick them and launch them. If you want an update, they update themselves. “There’s lower cost for everybody to get involved, and lower barriers to entry. It will bring in challengers and disruptors. I think you will see CNFs created by smaller firms and not just the ‘big three’ mobile operators.” It is worth noting that, at this stage, CNFs are still a theoretical concept. First working examples of containerized functions will be seen in the upcoming release of ONAP codenamed ‘Casablanca’ and expected in 2019. Another interesting part of the Linux Foundation is Open Networking Foundation (ONS), an operator-led consortium that creates open source solutions for some of u
Issue 30 • October/November 2018 45