Has virtualization become obsolete in 5G?

Mon Aug 3 05:38:28 UTC 2020

On 2/Aug/20 06:51, Ahmed elBorno wrote:
> Maybe I am off topic a little bit here and i'd like to be educated if
> i am wrong but I think those 5G applications will move from VMs into
> containers/microservices when their vendors see a business case to
> rearchitect them, maybe its already happening as we speak.

I'm still trying to figure out what "these 5G applications" are :-).

>
> On the other side of that coin is that product managers of these 5G
> apps seeing the margins on their apps diminish when they slice them to
> a form that allows other "orchestrators" to deploy them.

My understanding of "network slicing" is that an operator lets an MVNO
ride their network (happens today already), and that MVNO can further
"slice" their portion of the operators network to deliver different
performance levels for the different services they offer down to the
end-user.

Still not sure how this will work considering a great deal of the global
Internet is for services that live on the public Internet, and many
specialized/private services would typically still run over fibre. I
know we'd all like to see heart surgery over 5G, but something tells me
if you can afford it, the hospital can afford some fibre :-).

Perhaps M2M may have a use-case, but that's working reasonably well on
4G today, unless we expect to see a massive jump in performance with the
marginal improvement in radio latency between device and 5G tower.

>
> Another side is that the software engineers working on these Apps have
> a lot more prioritized items/things to develop (real core functions)
> so they will delay this transformation.

This is the crux of the issue.

Mark.