On 2/10/17 Wassim Haddad and Heikki Mahkonen from Ericsson and Amar Kapadia discussed "Serverless Unikernel VNF Scheduling" at the OPNFV 102 Meetup. Slides available here. Here is a quick summary:
Amar set the stage for why we might want to discuss an alternative VIM/ NFVI.
Wassim covered a wide variety of topics such as what are unikernels, what is serverless scheduling, and what are the benefits of applying these two mechanisms to NFV. Net-net, the benefits are staggering. VNF density per node can go up by 1-3 orders of magnitude. VNF performance can go up 2x. And VNF security improves dramatically (not sure how to quantify this benefit). We'll try to do some total-cost-of-ownership analysis at a future point to clearly quantify the first two benefits.
Next Heikki showed a demo where VNFs were popping up in response to requests and then disappearing. I'd be remiss in my characterization if I didn't say that people literally fell off their chairs when they saw the demo ;).
Finally, Amar ended by connecting the dots to OPNFV and discussing how a new project to work on a "next-gen compute scheduler" could be created in OPNFV to serve as an alternative to OpenStack Nova. The various options available are 1) Enhanced OpenStack Nova, 2) Kubernetes, 3) Docker Swarm, 4) Mesos, 5) VMware Photon Controller, 6) Intel ClearLinux CIAO, 7) a brand new open source project. Did we miss any option? Stay tuned for more on this topic...
Net-net, great experience and a wonderful audience! Thanks to the organizers Bin Hu and Ray Paik, and Spirent for hosting. The lunch was very nice indeed.
