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Merging 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 #61

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3 changes: 0 additions & 3 deletions whitepaper/cloud_native_thinking_for_telecommunications.md
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Expand Up @@ -96,9 +96,6 @@ Until the 1990’s, most functionality and applications for telecommunications r

This fostered a “top-down” approach to telecommunications systems that was imperative rather than declarative. This approach was resource intensive and expensive; redundancy meant acquiring multiple physical instances of required systems. This guiding architectural decision encouraged the tight bundling of numerous services and capabilities into individual physical systems. The result was not only high infrastructure and provisioning costs but also inefficient hyper-redundancy in system engineering for overlapping capabilities.

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### 1.5.2 Software Defined Networking And The Emergence of VNFs

In the late 1990s, the concept of virtualisation for enterprise computing garnered interest as enterprises tired of spending large sums of money on high-powered servers. Simultaneously, we saw the rapid rise in popularity of the commodity Open Source Linux Operating System. In 1999, VMware released its first virtualisation product for x86 devices. In the early 2010s, the concept of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) emerged as telcos and other users of big networking gear sought to virtualise their networking functionality, enhance resiliency and take advantage of commodity hardware. The concept of NFV encapsulated Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), Network Function Infrastructure (NFVI) and an orchestration component (MANO). The entire NFV hardware and software stack could be integrated and distributed across geographically dispersed data centers. In 2017, Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) emerged as the open source standard platform for orchestrating and automating physical and virtual network elements with full lifecycle management. NFV and ONAP primarily focused on creating and orchestrating virtual analogs for physical equipment - virtual boxes.

This was the same pattern followed during server virtualisation, when initial efforts focused on replicating physical servers as virtual entities. Cloud native however, requires a more fundamental redesign and rethink of how telco and backbone/core network systems function. This shift impacts both the software architectures being proposed and how the telco operator structures and organizes its staff.
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