Blog

Network services are a combination of application and network functions. They offer an end-to-end process while supporting and securing complex data flows. The SDN revolution is shaking up the network infrastructure, but the complexity of the network services is growing up alongside.

In the next years, 5G infrastructure will become a ubiquitous, flexible, broadband and programmable network that will be in the core of every social, business, and cultural process, enabling both economic growth and social prosperity.

The softwarization and virtualization of networks and network functions have elevated the complexity of securing networks by another notch. The security of the complete lifecycle of NFV based network services has to be revised and accounted for in order to address their basic security needs and, as a consequence, ensure their functioning.

Containers, like Docker, are a virtualisation technology that is rapidly gaining ground and is expected to have a great impact in the future deployments of cloud technologies and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). Containers virtualise the OS, making it possible to deploy multiple container-based applications on top of it. Because of this ability, they are very popular in the DevOps movement, as it makes it very fast to build, test and deploy applications.

Ongoing evolutions in the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) area show that software will play an increasingly important role within telecommunication services. Telco providers benefit from this, as it enables a faster introduction of new telecom services, combined with an agile set of features to optimize and fine-tune their performance. However, the provided NFV-based telecom service can only be well supported if adequate software tools are available. Therefore, the development, deployment and maintenance of such services puts specific requirements on the platform providing it.

The end-to-end Service Management is one of the network operators, as well as the wider industry, most important key NFV features. Business decisions are oriented to create different services for different customers, enabling a rich suite of personalized offers. The key value resides in that customers may be able to compose their own proprietary services selecting basic network service components in order to create the services that better fit with their specific needs.