nf.io: A file system abstraction for NFV orchestration

Abstract

In recent years, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has gained a lot of traction from both industry and academia. NFV promotes vendor-independence and rapid evolution through open source software, open standards, and open APIs. However, adopting these principles for virtual middleboxes or Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) is not enough. The VNF orchestration systems also need to adopt the same principles, otherwise a network operator may still face vendor lock-in. Moreover, standardization efforts take a long time to converge and are often futile. For this reason, we introduce nf.io that uses the existing well-known Linux file system interface for VNF orchestration. Different members of a DevOps team can readily utilize this tool without a cumbersome learning process. We have developed a prototype, and provided a set of example use-cases to demonstrate its effectiveness.