Member-only story
Cloud-Native Network Function and Kubernetes Part 1 — Introduction
Introduction to Cloud-Native Network Function (CNF)
For the past decade, we have witnessed the proliferation of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) such as virtualized edge routers and 4G EPC mobile gateways running on x86 servers instead of custom Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) or network processor based hardware platforms. The advance in high-speed multi-core CPU technology, and open-source virtualization software such as KVM enable network vendors to “bolt” up multiple multi-core x86 servers and Ethernet switches as the backplane to offer flexible, resilience and cost-effective sub-terabit networking platforms for VNFs.
With this kind of cost-effective and flexible virtualized x86 CPU-based networking platform for sub-terabit networking devices such as the edge routers and the wireless gateways, the hardware-based networking platforms using ASICs and network processors are now reserved for the multi-terabits networking devices such as the Core routers at the Internet Exchanges and large carrier networks.
A VNF typically comprises one or more Virtual Machines (VMs) each with its own operating system (i.e., guest OS) running on top of a Hypervisor such as KVM or VMWare. While we can place the VNFs to run on Clouds with orchestration systems such as Openstack to manage the life-cycle of the VMs to make it a Cloud-based VNF (i.e., VM-A deployment model), we have not yet taken the full advantages of the elasticity, and scaling of clouds and the advance in software packaging, deployment, and life-cycle management from Container and Kubernetes technology.
Lately, we are seeing many virtualized networking devices using a new kind of virtualized network function platform called the Cloud-Native Network Function (CNF) that promises to be more versatile, secure, and scalable than simply running VNFs on the clouds. Also, CNF is purposely-built with Kubernetes (K8s) and Container technology to run on public clouds such as the Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE) etc… This supports the long-term information technology vision of many corporations and carriers to run their applications and network functions on public clouds for compute resource elasticity and…
