Follow up to "has virtualization become obsolete in 5G"?

Etienne-Victor Depasquale edepa at ieee.org
Sat Jan 16 11:34:10 UTC 2021


>
> I'm also unsure where it mentions that virtualization is now obsolete.
>
"Obsolete" was my term.
The substance of my question last year was my surprise in observing
what appeared to be a trend that virtualization technologies (KVM, Xen,
Hyper-V ...)
are no longer the first choice for implementation of network functions.

Since then, every opportunity I've had to listen to operators, operators'
groups, vendors and analysts
has reaffirmed the preference of containerization technologies for
implementation of network functions (NFs).

What struck me in particular in the link I've shared is the extract I
quoted:
"Once the darling of the telecoms industry, NFV has had a rough ride in
recent years and has even lead some industry observers to proclaim that NFV
is dead."

NFV solutions are moving to VM based deployments as a stop-gap and for the
> future, towards micro-services built in containers.

Agreed ... except that some "industry observers" may link NFV exclusively
to virtualization technologies. I don't.
However, in their favour, I'd dare say that it's not technically sound to
blur the technical differences
between NFs implemented in VMs and NFs implemented in containers.
The term NFV is a bit of a stretch for what is really
network-function-containerization.

Cheers,

Etienne

On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 1:57 AM Laurent Dumont <laurentfdumont at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The amount of buzzwords in that page is quite incredible.
>
> I'm also unsure where it mentions that virtualization is now obsolete. NFV
> solutions are moving to VM based deployments as a stop-gap and for the
> future, towards micro-services built in containers.
>
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 6:38 AM Etienne-Victor Depasquale <edepa at ieee.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello folks,
>>
>> Last year, I posted to this list and asked "has virtualization become
>> obsolete in 5G"?
>>
>> A similar opinion seems to be gaining ground
>> <https://www.telecomtvperspectives.com/series/vmware/the-countdown-to-5g-and-cloud-native/>
>> .:
>>
>> "Once the darling of the telecoms industry, NFV has had a rough ride in
>> recent years and has even lead some industry observers to proclaim that NFV
>> is dead."
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Etienne
>>
>> --
>> Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale
>> Assistant Lecturer
>> Department of Communications & Computer Engineering
>> Faculty of Information & Communication Technology
>> University of Malta
>> Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
>>
>

-- 
Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale
Assistant Lecturer
Department of Communications & Computer Engineering
Faculty of Information & Communication Technology
University of Malta
Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
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