From Virtualization to Containerization

After seven years of trying, the telecom industry is still struggling to get to grips with network functions virtualization (NFV).The latest initiative to facilitate NFV adoption, the Common NFVI Telco Taskforce (CNTT), combines the efforts of the Linux Foundation, the GSMA, ETSI and a number of Tier 1 operators. Yet even this initiative is seen by some as trying to fix a fundamentally broken model and some industry commentators are writing NFV's obituary. Before the telecom industry has got to grips with "step one" virtualization, many industry leaders are already moving on to the next level -- containerization. This is a key part of making network software cloud-native i.e. designed, developed and optimized to exploit cloud technology such as distributed processing and data stores.