In the telecommunications industry, major technology evolutions have become a way of life. Operators are moving from physical network devices to NFV. Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) have been creating VNFs implemented in software using virtual machines. Now a major shift is under way to cloud-native based VNFs.
In a cloud-native world, applications are decomposed into “microservices” running in containers rather than dedicated VMs. This is so that they can more easily take advantage of the shared resources, speed, and agility of cloud environments. Since VNFs are, at their core, software applications themselves, they too are now being decomposed into their constituent microservices to become “cloud-native.”
This whitepaper discusses some of the considerations for developing cloud-native VNFs. Readers will learn in depth the impact of cloud-native approaches on today’s programmable networks and why NEPs should continue to prioritize programmability in their cloud-native VNFs for the future.
