Not only does the industry broadly agree on the reasons for the failure of NFV to date, it also agrees about the right way forward. This is to build network functions as software systems designed from the ground up for the cloud, in the same way as the big Web-scale players would approach the problem: the so-called cloud native approach.
However, these differences are so great that it’s not technically or economically feasible to evolve a legacy VNF to become a CNF. In other words, to build a CNF, you have to start from scratch. But what exactly are these differences? What truly distinguishes a CNF from a VNF? These are the questions that this white paper explores in depth.
