Many people and companies are betting that cloud-native networking will be the preferred way of implementing network functions in an easy and scalable way. It is based around the tenants of modularity, high availability, scalability, low-overhead networking, and ease of deployment. And a number of companies such as Google has shown that it is really possible to achieve these properties with it. But the architectural basis of cloud-native is quite different from the ones of virtualization-based NFV, but nevertheless, in many cases we continue to use the software packages that were designed for that drastically different architecture. The question is, how well does the current set of open source projects used in NFV work in a cloud-native environment and what needs to change in them in order to realize the cloud-native vision?
In this presentation, I will define what I mean with cloud-native networking and from that derive the system requirements needed to realize that vision. Based on these requirements, we can deduce a number of basic architectural properties, features and services that are needed in the system to be able to satisfy these requirements. Then I will go through the most popular open source projects such as Linux, DPDK and OVS and see how they satisfy these architectural properties and features. The main contribution of this presentation will be to show what we need to work on within these SW packages in order to realize cloud-native networking. Or maybe we need completely new SW projects to be able to achieve this.
Speakers: Magnus Karlsson