[e2e] j'accuse NFV

[Jon Crowcroft]

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