Are CNFs, VNFs?

The answer is yes. Our recent report “The VNFO – Ripe for Change” says this loudly and clearly.

Pardon the atrocious image. But I hope it encapsulates the dilemma appropriately.

It is important to reiterate the reasons for including containers under VNF and in essence, Kubernetes under VNFO.

Both VMs and containers are virtualization methodologies. Thus, network functions synthesized using VMs and containers qualify as VNFs.

In VNFs orchestrated by containers are sometimes referred to as cloud-native NFs (CNFs). Insight Research has also employed this term as early as 2020. Over time however, we have observed that the usage of CNFs is neither consistent nor uniform.

Most ‘traditional’ MANOs such as ONAP, OSM and all proprietary offerings now support containers and Kubernetes. Containers are thus one more means towards achieving the end-objective of VNFs.

In such situations, Insight Research finds it more appropriate to use VNF as an umbrella term and under this term, refer to VM or container as the specific virtualization methodology.

The question then arises – where would we slot NFs orchestrated by containers encapsulated in VMs? Answer is containers. Similarly, NFs orchestrated by VMs encapsulated in containers are slotted under VMs.

Kaustubha Parkhi Principal Analyst, Insight Research

RELATED BLOGS

Awakening the Beast in the RAN Equipment Market – An Nvidia Imperative!

Posted: September 24, 2024

      Nvidia has been showing some serious urgency into the RAN. Sample its vision for the AI-RAN Alliance, which it helped birth earlier this year, “Unlike standards-setting organizations, where all the efforts are focused on developing specification documents for interoperability, AI-RAN Alliance’s focus is to create implementation blueprints and benchmark the efficacies of … Continue reading Awakening the Beast in the RAN Equipment Market – An Nvidia Imperative!

The ‘Marvellous’ Opening of the AI Accelerator in the 5G RAN

Posted: March 25, 2024

      In end-February 2024, Marvell captured large bits of popular imagination when it open sourced OCTEON 10 ML/AI Accelerator Software to what it termed as optimization of 5G RAN Networks. Lying as it does at the intersection of AI and RAN, it is worth taking a deep dive into this development as AI … Continue reading The ‘Marvellous’ Opening of the AI Accelerator in the 5G RAN

The AI-RAN Alliance: The idea whose time has come

Posted: March 18, 2024

      Of all the announcements at MWC24, the one that validates our focus on AI in RAN is the formation of the AI-RAN Alliance. Coinciding with the release of our report “AI and RAN – How fast can they run?”, the Alliance checks all the boxes to furthering AI from the periphery of the … Continue reading The AI-RAN Alliance: The idea whose time has come