|
Contributors | Messages | Polls | Resources |
|
OPNFV's Kirksey: Open Source Network Automation – Virtual, Yet Human![]() The modern network is virtualized and automated, but no less human, according to the OPNFV's Heather Kirksey. On August 30, Kirksey presented a Light Reading Upskill University course on the intersection of open source with automation while emphasizing virtualization. As vice president of NFV at the Linux Foundation , Kirksey serves as director of the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. } (OPNFV) -- a Linux Collaborative Project that is on the record as being committed to "transforming networking." That transformation, according to Kirksey, is fundamentally founded in virtualized, open-source automation.
Fail and fail fast "On the application side, because you have a software infrastructure that has automation with it you can fail -- and fail fast -- with your service offerings," explained Kirksey. "So you can try a new service that does X, Y, and Z -- and people get excited -- and then it's easy to scale it up. Or no one likes it, but you haven't had to go roll out a new network to enable it." Kirksey differentiated application automation from infrastructure automation, noting that automated processes contribute to agile or continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) methodologies by enabling constant infrastructural updates and the infusion of new capabilities. "At the end of the day, NFV automation efforts contribute to whatever you're doing," said Kirksey. "So I think you'll see different ROIs and slightly different impacts based on whether you're more the infrastructure-type of developer or whether you're someone bringing a new application or service."
NFV transformation equals cultural transformation "The journey toward NFV is as much a cultural transformation of people and processes as it is any specific technology," Kirksey wrote in her foreword to Amar Kapadia and Nicholas Chase's book published earlier this year, Understanding OPNFV: Accelerate NFV Transformation using OPNFV. "Working side-by-side with NFV end users gives us extraordinary insight into the real-world challenges of NFV deployments along with the many opportunities of evolving toward a software defined future. Through this ongoing and active collaboration, OPNFV facilitates the development and evolution of open source NFV across the industry via integrated testing of the next-generation networking stack. It's a formidable and inspiring challenge that is producing real business value to NFV end users, technology providers and individuals alike." Kirksey echoed -- and escalated -- those sentiments in her Upskill U presentation. "As much as we talk about automation and we think that that's about bringing machines to take over what humans currently do, I would say that most of the work necessary to do that the right way is to get things working together," said Kirksey. "People think about the scripts, but really it is coming to agree upon the idea of what you're trying to accomplish and what the process is."
Virtualization and automation enhance business – and human – agility "SDN appeared on the scene, and now you have that ability to have a more programmable network to be able to provision things like Layer 2 VPNs more quickly and more easily, and the ability to set a service function chain across applications with easy scripts and clicks of a button," said Kirksey. "What I think really enables that is the way that it's all moving to software, so that you have that opportunity to build these really cool CI/CD pipelines with a lot of test automation and deployment gates in there." Nonetheless, virtualized automation is less about replacing human performance with artificial intelligence so much as enhancing human performance with "augmented" intelligence. Thus, Kirksey suggested, the juncture of automation and virtualization is a fundamentally human one. "All of that really at the end of the day is very people-oriented, and it's a lot about rethinking processes. Making sure business owners and technology owners are agreeing to processes, and then putting the tooling in place," summed up Kirksey. "The tooling is the icing of the cake that enables the implementation of it, but the automation only really works is if what it's doing is automating business processes that make sense cross-organizationally for you." Related posts:
— Joe Stanganelli, Contributing Writer, Telco Transformation |
![]() Level 3 announces additional gateways in new regions for its virtualized cloud security platform, Adaptive Network Security.
Industry experts weigh in with Telco Transformation on the keys to NFV success with open source technologies.
NTT Communications guides customers through complex network decisions.
A new self-serve Ethernet feature from Level 3, Level 3 eLynk, purports to make network connections to the cloud as flexible and agile as the cloud itself.
![]() ![]() ARCHIVED | December 7, 2017, 12pm EST
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
![]() Huawei Network Transformation Seminar The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete. |
|
![]() |
||
|
||
![]() |
Telco Transformation
About Us
Contact Us
Help
Register
Twitter
Facebook
RSS
Copyright © 2023 Light Reading, part of Informa Tech, a division of Informa PLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Cookie Policy | Terms of Use in partnership with
|