To keep the world connected, telecommunication networks demand performance and programmability to meet customers when and where they are, from streaming the winning goal of the world cup to coordinating responses to the latest natural disaster.
When switchboards were still run by human operators, telco companies were all about custom hardware with “black boxes” from vendors providing the speed the network needed. These black boxes controlled the performance of the network, which also made it dependent on where they were actually deployed.
As telcos moved from traditional phone calls to additional services like messaging and mobile data, the demands on the network pushed the boundaries of what was possible. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) sought to allow telcos to use “white box” commodity hardware to scale out throughput and increase flexibility.
Technologies like the Data Plane Development Kit (
Bill Mulligan