VNF Orchestration - Does everyone have it wrong?

Orchestration is the hottest topic in the Telco world today, however after looking closely I have found myself asking “has everybody got this wrong”. If you have been following the technology, Orchestration is an extension of automation. While underlying technology is in use by Webscale companies, Telco Orchestration has taken this to another level. Orchestration being the latest in a long line of projects that are going to create a single system managing all infrastructure and services integrating all parts of the telco platform together, a lofty goal. In particular a function called Virtual Network Function (VNF) Onboarding is going to create uniform user experience for operators and users alike for all services, and manage the infrastructure that delivers those services.

Lets start with an obvious problem, I don’t believe that Customers want Orchestration, in particular the component referred to as VNF Onboarding that abstracts the Virtual Functions User Interface. This is makes sense, a key component of a customer’s decision to use a Firewall, SD-WAN or Router is the user experience provided by that product. This is especially true in Security products where detailed understanding of the configuration, behavior and resulting security is critical. Putting aside the amount of work that would be required to put an abstracted interface on any of the leading security vendors management infrastructure, why would any customer choose to learn a new abstracted interface and figure out (reverse engineer) how each Telco has implemented this abstraction layer such that they can ensure their security policies are applied.

Now the engineering problem. To create this Orchestration infrastructure, an abstraction layer is proposed that generalizes the services and device categories. To realize the abstraction, a lower layer of adaption software is required for the myriad of VNFs used to deliver services. VNF’s within the same service or product class, especially complex ones, vary dramatically in their functionality, architecture and operation reducing meaningful uniformity. Further complicating matters, each of these VNF’s has or will have many versions. Also, don’t forget that getting initial configuration is the easy task, management lifecycle is the true driver of cost and complexity. Activation happens once, service management happens every day. The complexity of adapting the array of products and the amount of engineering effort required to continuously chase adaption ensures that using Orchestration will result in trailing adoption and simply transfer operational cost to development cost, erasing much of the value of automation.

If you have bought into VNF onboarding, you are probably asking yourself is this just theory or does the author have any direct experience in these systems, unfortunately the answer is the latter and I wish I had figured this out earlier, I would have saved a lot of time. We have developed Orchestration using commercial, open source and in-house tools. Even a straight forward router configuration for a highly uniform application has meaningful configuration variance. I have therefore concluded that a different solution is necessary, a far simpler solution that automates the connectivity and creation of the VNF but then delivers the User Experience that has been painstakingly developed using the detailed expertise of specialist vendors.

A contrarian view I know and I have been wrong in the past, but only time will tell.