Network Function Virtualization

One of the largest areas for development and deployment of the OpenStack platform has been in the telecommunications industry. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) provides a common IaaS platform for that industry, which is in the process of replacing the purpose-built hardware devices that provide network services with virtualized appliances that run on commodity hardware. Some of these services are routing, proxies, content filtering, as well as packet core services and high-volume switching. Most of these appliances have intense compute requirements, and they are largely stateless. These workloads are well-suited for the OpenStack compute model.

NFV use cases typically leverage hardware features, which can directly attach compute instances to physical network interfaces on compute nodes. Instances are also typically very sensitive to CPU, and memory topology (NUMA) and virtual cores tend to be mapped directly to physical cores. Orchestration either through Heat or TOSCA has also been a large focus for these deployments.

Architects of NFV solutions will focus primarily on virtual instance placement and performance issues and less on tenancy and integration issues.