This document discusses challenges in moving telecom applications to the cloud and how OpenStack capabilities can help address them. It describes telecom applications as traditionally being "pet" applications that require dedicated hardware and high availability. For the cloud, these applications would need to be more like "cattle" with specific SLAs. The document outlines OpenStack capabilities around basic features, management and orchestration, performance, availability and reliability, and operations that could fulfill requirements to support telecom applications in the cloud.
After Stu’s presentation on the business level opportunities, challenges and use cases, I’ll be focusing on a more detailed view of the challenges and use cases related to fulfilling the NFV vision using open source components, in particular OpenStack
Brief introduction of self (if not done at the start of the presentation)
Everyone is familiar with the “pets vs cattle” question whether it is applied to servers, VMs, or applications? So what if we ask that question for telecom applications?
If you look up the definition of a pet application in the dictionary, what do you see? A picture of a traditional telecommunications application!
This answer assumes a binary choice of which type of application a given application is when it really is a spectrum from one extreme to the other
Industry in transition, transitioning telco apps from very specialized pets to at least cloud deployable pets if not eventually cattle
Greenfield telco cloud apps may be much closer to IT style cloud apps but during the transition existing telecom applications that are migrated will still need to be supported
So what is it going to take to transition telecom applications from being pets to cattle or at least closer to cattle on that spectrum?
Part of that transition will entail changes to the applications themselves
But the non-functional characteristics (performance, availability, etc.) of these applications is not going to change with the transition to running them in a cloud environment
Here are the major areas where OpenStack as a VIM in the NFV architecture needs to change:
Note this is a sampling of some of the significant capabilities of OpenStack required to support NFV, it is far from an exhaustive list but should provide a view of the inherent challenges in implementing a full NFV solution
Also note that this list can be viewed primarily as gaps there are some of the required capabilities are already supported by OpenStack
Before we talk about some of the challenges of moving telecom applications to the cloud and what that means to OpenStack, let’s take a very quick look at the NFV reference architecture
Who here fully understands the NFV architecture shown here? Everybody knows the difference between a PNF and a VNF, right?
A lot going on in this figure but as we talk about the telecom challenges and use cases in using OpenStack to realize the NFV reference architecture there are 4 key elements (and we’ll ignore the rest):
NFV infrastructure (NFVI)
Physical and virtual compute, storage, and network resources
Virtualized Infrastructure Managers, e.g. OpenStack
The “MANO stack”
The VNFs
I won’t talk about the details of all the interfaces but we will indirectly talk about some of the requirements associated with the displayed interfaces
This is a bit of a catchall slide that captures a set of functional capabilities that are required to support a telco cloud but do not fall into one of the other categories
Latency: Have to be able to be able to guarantee worst case network latency
Overriding goal is ensuring SLAs for all cloud resources used by VNFs including compute, networking, and storage
I say enable since the only availability numbers that matter ultimately are the application’s
Note that in the telco world when talking about availability numbers, we are talking about service availability, i.e. the application is available and able to process service requests
This is more from the cloud operator’s perspective and certainly applies to more than just telecom applications