Over the last ten years consumption model of the Service Provider(SP),or Telco, network has evolved. Service Providers/Mobile Operators are finding themselves competing with leaner/meaner Over the Top Providers (OTP) such as Google and Amazon who have redefined what they use, when they use and how they use. In order to compete with these OTPs, operators need to be able to:

As a result of this, the Telcos are now leaning towards using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) equipment such as Dell, HP, IBM & Cisco servers to deploy network functions virtualization (NFV). The functions are referred to as virtual network functions(VNF). Examples of VNFs are virtualized routers, switches, gateways, firewall, Network Address Translation (NAT) and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). This gives the SPs the low cost generic hardware and the freedom from vendor-lock at the same time allowing them to scale the network as the demand grows and shrink as it decreases which they would not be able to do as easily with purpose-built hardware.

The agility in deploying the systems and services on demand comes from what is referred to as “Orchestration”. Systems orchestration allows us to deploy the VNFs on the fly as well as manage the life cycle of these (Liveliness, Health etc). Service orchestration on the other hand deals with provisioning the VNFs for day-N configuration that is generally related to services.