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...

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...

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...