Toward True Cloud Native NFV MANO

Abstract

The telecommunication industry is making a major shift towards cloud native Network Functions Virtualization. However, being cloud native implies more than just replacing Virtual Machines with containers. The cloud native approach changes the way virtual network functions are being composed, deployed, and configured as network services and how these services are being orchestrated and managed at run time. Traditional Network Management and Orchestration (MANO) frameworks are implemented via specialized engines that have been conceived prior to the cloud native era. Thus, they inherit many traits, which impede pivoting to cloud native. In this paper we focus on some fundamental challenges and propose a novel cloud native MANO architecture that exploits advantages of Kubernetes (K8s) a de facto industry standard for container orchestration.