Heavy Networking 558: No Time For Hardware – The Case For NFV

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Taking that thing that used to be a router or firewall or load balancer on fancy hardware and sticking it on a generic x86 or ARM server. You now have a virtualized version of the network function. Pretty handy when you’re constrained for rack space or want to spin these things up and down on demand. Cloud friendly. Multi-tenant friendly. Service chaining friendly. But if you love to hug your router, maybe you’d rather avoid NFV. Maybe you’d rather run physical networking hardware with very special silicon and virtualize that. And you have good reasons. And stories. And scars. It’s 2021. Are your reasons for hating on NFV still good reasons? Our guests today think just the opposite. In fact, they don’t have time for hardware. Let’s talk through what that means with Michael Pfeiffer, Cloud Networking Architect working in the salt mines at a VAR; and Brad Gregory, Senior Product Manager at Equinix. This isn’t a sponsored show. We’re just going down the road of seeing if the NFV juice is worth the squeeze these days. We discuss: * Whether NFV performance on commodity x86 is sufficient * Overcoming trust and control issues with NFV providers * Whether NFV instances are ephemeral or forever * How much operational effort is required to adopt NFV * More Show Notes: Michael Pfeiffer on LinkedIn Brad Gregory on LinkedIn Ethan Banks on Twitter Greg Ferro on Twitter