For those who, like me, find the current NFV activity diffused and missing the point more often than not, the prospect of yet another body with their fingers in the pie stirs mixed emotions. The New IP Agency (NIA) was launched at the Light Reading Big Telecom Event last week with (according to the group) four missions; information, communications, testing and education. Since NIA is born out of a realistic picture of where we are with NFV, there’s hope. Since we already have a couple dozen groups working on NFV, there’s risk NIA will simply be another of them.
On the “hope” side, there is no question that there are major problems developing with NFV. The original mission of NFV was to reduce costs by substituting lower-cost hosting for higher-cost appliances—a capex-driven argument. This was discounted by most operators I’d met within the first year of NFV’s existence; they said there weren’t enough savings attainable with that model versus just forcing vendors to discount their gear. NFV’s benefit goals have shifted to opex reduction and service agility, both of which could be substantial.
The operative word is “could”, because while the goals shifted the scope of NFV’s efforts did not. The specifications still focus on the narrow range of services where large-scale substitution of virtual functions for appliances has been made. Since legacy equipment is outside NFV’s scope, you can’t do end-to-end orchestration or management within the specs, which means that opex efficiency and service agility are largely out of reach—in standards terms. There is also a very limited vision of how services are modeled and managed even inside the scope of the spec, and that’s largely what contributed to the situation Light Reading called the “Orchestration zoo”.
It would be possible, in my view, to assemble a complete model for NFV that embraced end-to-end services and even organized management and operations processes. My ExperiaSphere example shows that you could build such a thing largely from open-source elements and that it could support the ISG’s work as well as embrace TMF and OASIS cloud specifications. The TMF has run some Catalyst demos on operations integration, and there are at least four NFV vendors whose orchestration strategies could provide enough integration breadth to capture the full benefit case. Arguably all of these conform to standards.
Stevens once said that the “wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” NIA doesn’t propose to write more, but I wonder whether it could even hope to do the choosing. What it could do is to shine some light on the real problems and the real issues.
Example: An “orchestration zoo” isn’t necessarily a disaster. The cost of orchestration tools is hardly significant in the scope of NFV infrastructure costs. If multiple orchestration tools delivered better benefits then they could be better than having a single standardized one. What we can’t afford, and what NIA would have to help the industry to avoid, is either a loss of benefits or a loss of infrastructure economies. Multiple orchestration approaches could lead to that more easily than a unified approach, but if we managed how orchestration processes related to both infrastructure and operations processes we could avoid real harm.
Example: Service modeling is really important both in preserving benefits and preserving economies of scale in infrastructure. A good service model both describes deployment and records results of deployment. You need it to organize the components of a service, and to reorganize them if you have to scale horizontally under load or replace a piece. You need a service model to start with goals—an intent model. You need it to decompose downward in an orderly way, with each transition between modeling approaches represented by a hard service/intent-modeled boundary. You need to end up with an abstract vision of hosting and connection services that doesn’t expose technology specifics upward to services, but models it as features across all possible implementations. There’s been next to no discussion of service modeling, and NIA could help with that.
Example: Current PoCs focus too much on individual services and not enough on broad opportunities or systemic infrastructure choices. That’s because we started with the notion of use cases, which were service-based applications of NFV. Since there was no notion of unity, only of use cases, it’s not surprising that we exploded the number of “orchestrators.” We’re beyond that now, or should be. A PoC can validate technology, but deployment requires we validate the totality of carrier business practices, the whole service lifecycle, and that we do so inside a universal vision of NFV that we can reuse for the next service. NIA could help PoCs “grow up”, elevate themselves into business cases by embracing both the other horizontal pieces of a service and the vertical components of operations processes.
Where NIA could help might be easier to decide than how it could help. We don’t know how it will be constituted, other than that LR will have at least a temporary board membership. From the early sponsorship and support it appears likely it will have vendors involved, and also likely that it will charge for membership as bodies like the ONF do. One thing that’s unusual and could be exploited is the notion of an explicit partnership with a publisher, and perhaps through that an analyst firm (Heavy Reading). It’s my view that simply having good coverage, meaning objective and thorough coverage, of NFV could be helpful by putting the right issues out front in the discussions.
In my view, the critical factor in making NIA successful is whether vendors who offer SDN and NFV products see it as a path to making the business case, not just proving the technology. Operators tell me that current PoCs don’t have the budget for deployment in the great majority of cases, and operator CFOs say that they don’t make the business case to get the budget either, at least as they’re currently constituted. Vendors need to sell something here, not just play in the science sandbox, so they could mutually gain from efforts to elevate the mission of trials so that it includes the operations efficiency and meaningful new-service and service-agility elements.
Obviously that could be tricky. Vendor cooperation tends to fall down at the first sign of somebody being able to drive things to a competitive advantage. The “zoo” Light Reading describes wouldn’t be an issue if vendors were in accord with respect to how to approach NFV or SDN. In fact, as we know, there are vendors who’d like to see both ideas fall flat on their faces. I witnessed some sharp operator-to-vendor exchanges even in the early days of NFV as operators tried to assure that vendors wouldn’t poison the NFV well. If NIA falls prey to that kind of behavior then there would be no consensus to drive the industry to, and likely no useful outcome. How can it avoid it, though? Ultimately all the industry forums are driven by whoever funds them most.
Light Reading’s participation, or that of any publication or analyst group, will also raise concerns. Everyone wants to be a sponsor of a popular forum, after all, and the NIA charter says that the body will buy services from Light Reading for at least the first year. How will that impact the way NIA issues are covered by other publications, or treated by other analyst firms? Might other firms want to launch their own initiatives, or at least cast a few stones in the direction of an initiative launched by a competitor? Light Reading has always been fair in their coverage of my own NFV-related activities and I don’t think they’d be unfair in covering NIA, but will everyone believe that?
I’ll be honest here. If I believed that the path to SDN and NFV success was clear and that we had a good chance of getting or being on it with the initiatives underway, my skepticism would overcome my enthusiasm on NIA and I’d probably be against the notion. The problem is that the founders, including Light Reading, are absolutely right; something is needed. I guess that unless and until NIA proves it can’t do something positive, I’ll be supporting whatever it can do.