Open source and collaboration stacks up in telco virtualization on the cloud

OpenStack Ecosystem Technical Lead Ildikó Vancsa drives NFV related feature development activities in projects like OpenStack’s Nova and Cinder, as well as onboarding and training. The Network Virtualization event team caught up with her ahead of Network Virtualization & SDN Europe in May.

“I’m an open source advocate both personally and professionally and when the movement towards virtualisation and the cloud started, telcos started looking into OpenStack and we began to explore how they could use us,” she explained.

“It has been a very interesting journey, even if it hasn’t always been easy. Virtualisation really is a transformation both from mind set perspective as well as technology perspective,” she said.

The concept sounds simple enough – lift functions from a physical hardware stack and put it into a virtual machine in the cloud. The realty is quite different. In an ideal world, Vancsa suggested you would just rewrite everything from scratch, but this approach is not possible.

“It’s a short sentence to summarize it but it’s a really hard thing to do; especially because those functions are often tightly coupled with specialised hardware,” she said.

This hardware traditionally represented the whole functions stack, all the way out to software. As Vancsa put it: “We needed to support this journey while at the same time looking for where network functions can go. We need to be able to support the legacy network functions as well as providing an environment for new applications, written with the with this new mind set”.

“We do not have to reinvent the wheel and we [OpenStack] didn’t try that. We worked with companies and vendors in the in the NFV and networking space to be able to plug the components that they prefer to use into OpenStack and provide the functionality that they need,” she said.

OpenStack has now moved away from being one huge code stack to become more modular, offering standalone components such as load balancing as a service.

One crucial aspect of getting OpenStack right is collaboration across telco as open source becomes more and more widespread. In Vancsa’s words: “Back in the old days you had one vendor and they supplied your hardware and software and it was all tightly integrated and, no questions asked, it was supposed to work.”

“As open source has become more popular in telecom environments, we see more operators picking up commodity hardware and have a couple of vendors supplying software. So they might have one vendor supplying the MANO components and another for the orchestration layer,” she explained. “This means it is critical to keep an eye on interfaces and interoperability.”

For Vancsa, collaboration, open infrastructure and open source software are vital for virtualization to succeed, especially as telcos move more into the cloud, and events such as Network Virtualization & SDN Europe are vital for this.

“You get the chance to talk to people and basically make the first connection after which is just so much easier to collaborate on other forums,” she enthused.

Ildikó Vancsa was also a panellist on a recent webinar from Network Virtualization & SDN Europe on Virtualzation and the Cloud. You can listen to the webinar on-demand here. Network Virtualization & SDN Europe 2019 takes place 21-23 May at the Palace Hotel in Berlin. Find out more here.