[e2e] j'accuse NFV

[Khaled Elsayed]

Well, yes latency added for that remote NVF is important issue, but I guess
most people are into NVF for the flexibility and ease of
adding/removing/configuring new services. A wrong usage model for NFV can
certainly be anti-productive for a network.

Like many other things in engineering, it is a trade-off.

Just my two cents.

Khaled



On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Jon Crowcroft <jon.crowcroft at cl.cam.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Try as I might, I cannot really see Network Function Virtualization as much
> more than yet another telco landgrab on internet stuff. But somewhat more
> critically, I vew the idea of taking some of our precious middle bodily
> fluid flow processing functions, and moving them a) off the box built by a
> middlebox expert, and b) off the direct path, as actually
> counter-productive. Lets just take three boring run-of-the-arithmetic-mill
> such services:-
>
> load balancer - this is on the latency critical path before you get to any
> service - additional latency/hops/virtualization overhead is
> counter-indicated by any sane business model
>
> wan accelerator - especially for 2.9x-4.8xG wireless data networking
> services - these are kind of rather localized by definition, right? I mean
> they are dealing with impedance mis-matches in the interweb (tcp splice,
> etc - see
> https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/publication_details?n=3730
>
> firewall (or ids) - so these sit on trust boundaries, so it seems like a
> reduction in security to move them anywhere (like above a hypervisor,
> unless people are running, say, seL4:-), plus they might also be protecting
> the infrastructure itself as well as customers, so it would seem
> counter-productive to increase their attach surface in any way
>
> So ok, not all virtualization involves moving stuff to a different location
> often. But it does also imply some resource pooling (i.e. more than 1
> instance of a Foo in the NFooV is running above the hyperv) - so this seems
> like you might be buying into a wealth of pain with elasticity, when you
> had just nailed down super-hard multiplexed allocation of cycles for
> forwarding or filtering or protocol adaptation or responsive redirection
> etc etc...
>
> I guess if you are in the business of proxies (web content caches etc) then
> it might make sense, but then it isn't really a Network Function that is
> being virtualized - its just you have some server blades running xen
> or vmware or clickos or mirageOS or whatever with an HTTPd on them
>
>  - err, so next, will we be running IP forwarding virtualized? oh, no,
> wait, thats just a, um VPN...
>
> so if the telco folks do manage to Virtualize all those annoying middle
> boxes Netwreck Functions, perhaps they could just cause them all to
> evaporate and restore the sublime end-to-end internet
> goodness....carrier-degrade, surely?
>
> j
> http://openmirage.org/
> http://cnp.neclab.eu/clickos/
> https://sel4.systems/
> etc
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