Thu, Sep 5, 2019 | 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM IST | 60 Mins
Despite the rapid evolution in virtualization over the past couple of years, service providers have concluded that even more drastic advances are needed. In order to meet their long-term goals of delivering compelling end-user experiences from highly-efficient operations, service providers are taking a cue from the webscale giants and turning their focus toward “cloudification” as the next strategic initiative beyond virtualization.
Since the introduction of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in 2012, we’ve seen physical network functions (PNFs) being replaced, one by one, with virtual network functions (VNFs) via virtual machines (VMs.) In contrast cloudification is implemented through the deployment of “cloud-native” services. Cloud-native services are developed from the ground up for deployment in cloud or edge data centers. Designed for simplicity, flexibility and rapid deployment, cloud-native services are typically implemented as microservices that run within Linux containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, rather than as complex VNFs that run within VMs.
A cloud-native strategy allows service providers to accelerate both the development and deployment of new services by enabling practices such as DevOps and continuous deployment and integration (CD/CI,) while the ability to rapidly scale up or scale down those services allows for resource utilization to be optimized in real-time, in response to traffic spikes and one-time events.
This session explores some of the key drivers moving the industry toward cloudification. In particular:
- Some of the benefits of adopting a cloud native strategy
- The unique challenges to implementing containers in edge and far edge environments
- How to leverage open source as a time to market advantage
- Why, and how, to implement a hybrid strategy (containers, VMs, and legacy infrastructure)
Speaker: Kiran Kumar Sambasivan, Senior Field Application Engineer, Wind River Systems