Last week I attended the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado. The Open Infrastructure Summit is the new name for what was previously called the OpenStack Summit. The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) changed the name of the event to reflect their overall transition from providing support to one project (i.e. OpenStack) to providing support and governance...

Predictions for Edge Computing in 2019 The edge is a new and important place to be. In 2019 edge and 5G related technologies will steadily improve. Here are a few predictions: 1. Hardware: More Important Than Ever Some edge deployments will be relatively small, as small as a couple of servers. With such limited resources...

Kubernetes Persistent Volumes with NetApp Trident Kubernetes is an open source project that provides the ability to manage containers. It has a (now defacto standard) API for operating containers and applications built on them; it helps organizations manage the container lifecycle. However, there are many things it does not do on its own, and one...

Layer 1 SFC with BigSwitch   In previous posts, we have tried to define what Service Function Chaining (SFC) is as well as how one can “fake” SFC at the layer 3 level. However, based on our definition of SFC we want to be moving packets from one virtual port pair to another, essentially at the...

100,000 Carrier Clouds Coming Online   Over the next few years, we expect to see a large number of data centers coming online. By 2030, we could see one hundred thousand new carrier cloud data centers. — CIMI Corp Edge Cloud In this context, a “carrier cloud” is edge computing owned by Communication Service Providers, aka Carriers.  Edge...

OpenStack Edge Hackathon   On the weekend before the 2018 OpenStack summit in Berlin, I attended a hackathon held at hub:raum, a German co-working and event space, and startup accelerator. The building where hub:raum is located is one of the key Internet locations in Germany, so it’s apt that the event was held there. We...

ONAP: First Steps with NFV and Datacenter Automation Telecommunications is going through a paradigm shift. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is the key driver behind this change. For the purposes of this blog post, NFV is an umbrella term that relates to the entire NFV ecosystem: from Infrastructure as a Service platforms (IaaS) like OpenStack, to...

Zero to ONAP in Seven Minutes The concept of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), as simple as it is, brings with it much complexity. In some respects NFV is simply taking virtualization – a technology most IT organizations are quite familiar with, and indeed is a commodity, –  and applying it to telecommunications systems. For various...

OPENCONTRAIL AND KUBERNETES Editors note: After this article was written the OpenContrail project changed its name to Tungsten Fabric. Software Defined Networking (SDN) exploded onto the scene in and around 2008, in part due to the creation and popularization of OpenFlow. While OpenFlow did not specifically cause the development of SDN, it was certainly a...

NFV MANO – OpenBaton   Certainly in the last few months the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) has taken the lion’s share of publicity. But there are other MANO solutions, some commercial, some open source MANO. OpenBaton is an open source MANO that has most, if not all of the required features of a MANO...

One of the things we do at IDX is help organizations onboard Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). VNF Onboarding is an involved and complex process with many steps. One of the activities in our onboarding process involves the performance testing, verification, and dimensioning of a VNF. In this particular example we discuss testing a Domain Name...

From May 21st to 24th of 2018 the OpenStack Summit was held at the beautiful, world class Vancouver Conference Center. Several IDX colleagues and I attended the conference, not only to take in talks by others but also to present research of our own. We were also fortunate to participate in the Edge mini-keynote on...

We know that containers are an important new technology (well, at least Linux containers are, there have been similar technologies in existence for some time). Docker based containers, still heavily utilized even in Kubernetes, build on Linux technologies such as cgroups and network namespaces to achieve isolation. However, other technologies can be “plugged in.” We...

I have a pet theory that it’s all about dependencies. I work in an area, Network Function Virtualization, NFV for short, that is made up of many complex systems. The most obvious example is OpenStack, which is notoriously considered complicated. To be fair, there are many more high level systems like it that are also...

A colleague and I gave a presentation entitled “5G Network Slicing and OpenStack” at the 2018 Vancouver OpenStack summit. We did a lot of research, reading 70 to 100 papers (whitepapers, standards body papers, academic papers, you name it–so many we published a bibliography) to try to determine what network slicing is and how OpenStack can...

Faking Service Chains at Layer 3 In the last post we introduced the concept of Service Function Chaining (SFC). In that post we suggested that SFC occurs at the virtual port layer, somewhere around layer 1 of the OSI model. We can debate whether it is truly layer 1 or not, in part because SFC...

Introduction to Service Function Chaining Service Function Chaining (SFC), which I will describe in this post, is an important feature that arises out of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). SFC is most applicable to telecommunications companies or in security applications, but also has broader application. Currently the networking space is an...