SDN world 2015: unikernels, compromises and orchestrated obsolescence

Last week's Layer123 SDN and OpenFlow World Congress brought its usual slew of announcements and claims.

From my perspective, I have retained a contrasted experience from the show. 

On one hand, it is clear that SDN has now transitioned from proof of concept to commercial trial, if not full commercial deployment and operators are now increasingly understanding the limits of open source initiatives such as OpenStack for carrier-grade deployments. The telling sign is the increasing number of companies specialized in OpenFlow or other protocols high performance hardware based switches.

It feels that Open vSwitch has not hit its stride, notably in term of performance and operators are left with either going open source, cost efficient but not scalable nor performing or compromising with best of breed, hardware-based, hardened switches that offer high performance and scalability but not the agility of software-based implementation yet. What is new, however, is that operators seem ready to compromise for time to market, rather than wait for a possibly more open solution that could -  or not - deliver on its promises.

On the NFV front, I feel that many vendors have been forced to lower their silly claims in term of performance, agility and elasticity. It is quite clear that many of them have been called to prove themselves in operators' labs and have failed to deliver. In many cases, vendors are able to demonstrate agility, through VM porting / positioning using either their VNFM or an orchestrator's integration, they are even, in some cases, able to show some level of elasticity with auto-scaling powered by their own EMS, and many have put out press releases with Gbps or Tbps or millions of simultaneous sessions of capacity...
... but few are able to demonstrate all three at the same time, since their performance achievement has, in many cases been relying on SR-IOV to bypass the hypervisor layer, which ties the VM to the CPU in a manner that makes agility and elasticity extremely difficult to achieve.
Operators, here again, seem bound to compromise between performance or agility if they want to accelerate their time to market.

Operators themselves came in troves to show their progress on the subject, but I felt a distinct change in tone in term of their capacity to effectively get vendors deliver on the promises of the NFV successive white papers. One issue lies flatly on the operators' attitude themselves. Many MNO are displaying unrealistic and naive expectations. They say that they are investing in NFV as a means to attain vendor independence but they are unwilling to perform any integration themselves. It is very unlikely that large Telecom Equipment Manufacturer will willingly help deconstruct their value proposition by offering commoditized, plug-and-play, open interfaced virtualized functions.

SDN and NFV integration is still dirty work. Nothing really performs at line rate without optimization, no agility, flexibility, scalability is really attained without fine tuned integration. Operators won't realize the benefits of the technology if they don't get in on the integration work themselves.

At last, what is still missing from my perspective is a service creation strategy that would make use of a virtualized network. Most network operators still mention service agility and time to market as a key driver, but when asked what they would launch if their network was fully virtualized and elastic today, they quote disappointing early examples such as virtual (!?) VPN, security or broadband on demand... timid translations of existing "services" in a virtualized world. I am not sure most of the MNOs realize their competition is not each other but Google, Netflix, Uber, Facebook and others...
By the time they launch free and unlimited voice, data and messaging services underpinned by advertising or sponsored model, it will be quite late to think of new services, even if the network is fully virtualized. It feels like MNOs are orchestrating their own obsolescence.

At last, the latest buzzwords you must have in your presentation this quarter are:
The pet and cattle analogy, 
SD WAN,
5G

...and if you haven't yet formulated a strategy with respect to containers (Dockers, etc...) don't bother, they're dead and the next big thing are unikernels. This and more in my latest report and workshop on "SDN NFV in wireless networks 2015 / 2016".

SDN NFV in Telco 2015-2016 exec summary

2015 has been the year that SDN NFV efforts “got real” in telco networks. Past the first two years of enthusiasm that were marked by unrealistic vendors’ announcements and a flurry of participation in standards, open source and proof of concept projects. These efforts certainly put the technology on the map and have set operators and vendors priorities towards the exploration of the maturity, promises and limits of the technology.

One of the main problems with a revolutionary approach such SDN and/or NFV implementation is that it suggests a complete network overhaul to deliver its full benefits. In all likeliness, no network operator is able to operate fully these kind of changes in less than a 10 years' timescale, so what to do first?

The choice is difficult, since there are a few use cases that have seemed easy enough to roll out but deliver little short term benefits (vCPE, some routing and switching functions...); while the projects that should deliver the highest savings, the meaty ones, seem quite far from maturity (EPC, IMS, c-RAN...) in a multi-vendor elastic environment.

The problem is particularly difficult to solve because most of the value associated with virtualization of mobile networks in the short term is supposedly ties to capex and opex savings. The business case for saving based on new infrastructure introduction is difficult to make without compelling new revenues streams financing the architectural upgrade.

Islands of SDN or NFV implementations in a sea of legacy network elements is not going to generate much saving. It could arguably generate new revenue streams if these were used to launch new services, but today’s focus has been so far to emulate and translate physical function and networks into virtualized ones, with little effort in term of new service creation.

As a result, the business case to deploy SDN or NFV in a commercial network today is negative and likely to stay so for the next few years unless innovative services are launched. I expect the momentum to continue, though, since it will have to work and to deliver the expected savings for network operators to stand a chance to stay in business.

The other side of this coin is the service offering.  While flexibility, time to market and capacity to launch new services are always quoted as some of the benefits of network virtualization, it seems that many operators have given up on innovation and service creation. The examples of new services are few and far between and I would hope that these would be the object of more focused efforts.

OTT services explosion, combined with the progressive opacity of the traffic due to encryption conspire to make network planning extremely difficult. Peak traffic are unpredictable and increasing in frequency and magnitude, which makes the rationale for network capacity purchase based on dedicated appliances untenable from an economic standpoint.

Revenue stagnation is a given, with little in the way of new streams from new services such as VoLTE or M2M for a few years.

Cloud technology seems to be the key to the new OTT providers’ agility, but its implementation supposes a complete organization, structural and process upheaval that network operators are hesitating to implement without a firm business case.

SDN remains a reliable, mature technology for enterprise and IT cloud management and traffic switching but requires important efforts to adapt to telecommunication networks, mindsets and regulatory frameworks.

NFV is emerging as a key potential effect multiplier but, without a viable service orchestration framework is becoming a collection of large proprietary frameworks from legacy telecom equipment manufacturers or an endless suite of isolated virtual network functions with little coherent cohabitation model for a harmonious service delivery.

All is not lost though, with an ecosystem that is moving faster than any initiative in the telecom standards world, it feels that the vendors, operators can find the right recipe within a few iterations, unleashing a flexible, scalable elastic environment for the cost-effective  creation and management of tomorrow’s services.

There is certainly a race between the likes of AT&T, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom on the service provider side and Affirmed Networks, ALU, Ericsson, Huawei and HP as some of the leading vendors to deliver on the promises of SDN and NFV in telco networks.

This report provides a review of the main trends that are pushing network operators to move towards simplified cost effective network architecture and the vendors’ strategies and roadmaps to address this disruption in their traditional architecture and revenue model.