In the past, services have been the direct product of cooperative behavior of systems of network devices. The devices communicate with each other to learn network topology, status, and the location of endpoints in a process called “adaptive discovery.” This collection of adaptive processes ties networks tightly to protocols and ties devices to services, which means that service changes can demand protocol and sometimes even device changes. If virtual networks can break this tie, it could be… well … huge.
Services divide into three basic categories — connection services, on-network hosting services, and endpoint services. Connection services are the things that move traffic among endpoints; hosting services are services offered on the network (websites and the cloud); and endpoint services are things like firewall, network address translation, dynamic host configuration, and so forth that are offered per (and usually at) an endpoint and appear to be a logical part of a connection services. A big, perhaps even the biggest, question for virtual networks is how they’d relate to these three classes.
If virtual networks let you compose virtual networks from a collection of users and applications, virtual connection-point services could let you compose features. With network functions virtualization (NFV), you could deploy security, monitoring and management, addressing, and even load-balancing tools as needed, move them around to follow users or applications, and change or modernize the features when better stuff is available — all without changing out any devices.
Read more at No Jitter.
