 colleagues across the telco industry and we published a white paper which was now quite famous to so-called NFE white paper published in October 2012 and this announced the future direction for telecom networks and that paper introduced the term network functions virtualization or NFE which we actually ourselves cooked up and then we founded a body called European Technology Telecommunications Standards Institute to host all of the documentation and specification work that we wanted to do. That was back in 2013 in 2014 we wanted to get the open source communities involved in what we were doing so we founded a new open source community called Open Platform for NFE. OP NFE probably some of you are pretty aware of it is now merging with another organization called CNTT and is now called Anuket so OP NFE is now transitioning to a new form. Back in 2014 you guys know Kubernetes initial release from Google and that's why I guess I'm here because Kubernetes then became a new way to implement software within the cloud environments and we wanted to use that too. The first commercial NFE deployments took place in 2015 just four years after we brought out our white paper and since then we've had obviously commercial deployments of NFE around the world but at CNNV it's been doing all of the specification work for the industry and we've had now three releases of specifications and the fourth release is now in progress so that's really the basic concept. The main thing is we want to use industry standard hardware and run all kinds of exciting network workloads on those but there are some points to remember about telecommunications right telecom network infrastructures are not the same as as enterprise IT environments it's heavily regulated it's massive geographic and volumetric scale and there can be no downtime for software updates right so when someone's dialing 911 on their phone you can't suddenly have that call cut off because a IT guy somewhere is doing some maintenance so that's one of the really key things to remember about telecommunications network. The other thing about telecoms is that the services persist for many many years and that means that the technology itself on which the service runs is changing but the service itself mustn't change. A good example of course is telephony making a call today is the same as it was 50 years ago and you think well you know the technology in that time has evolved but the service hasn't evolved very much. Network operators are unique operations are unique to each operator and jurisdiction so the requirements for telecoms operators in Europe are a little bit different from the US so there isn't a one-size-fits-all for the telecommunications environment right so one operator has a particular set of requirements and time scales maybe BT in the UK AT&T has a different set of requirements and different time scales so this is something to bear in mind in the open source community and I'll come back to that in a while. Each operator must be in full control of its destiny so we can't have a community that decides what the time scales are and tells the telecom operator what that time scales are for a release that's over of open stack or something else the operator says no I want that release on this day and if I don't get it on that day then I'll miss some of my regulatory or commercial imperatives so telecom operators must be in control of their own destiny and that really comes down to a key thing in telecoms and that's standards. When people hear the word standards they think oh that's a long time to take takes a long time to do standards it's very slow and it's not very innovative that's probably true in some respects but it's absolutely crucial to facilitate innovation because you want interoperability between all of the people that contribute technology to our networks. So one of the things that I have got here I'm not going to go into the detail on this slide you can read it how the comparing standards with open source what's the difference what's the pros and cons standards basically is about specifications open source of course is about code so where does standards and open source meet? Well first thing to say is that standards define interoperable frameworks these are the frameworks that produce the network architectures that we want to deploy and that we want that to support software diversity so the standard decision to suspect and then we want the industry to deliver to us the the software solutions that support those standards. Open source of course I know you guys that know about open source are in Kubernetes it's absolutely critical to accelerate innovation and especially in applications right so to me open source are absolutely and standards are absolutely complementary it's not an either or they're both very important in our industry and one of the things I'd like to draw your attention to which Raoul knows I'm passionate about is diversity so in in in all things we want diversity we want all kinds of viewpoints we want all kinds of cultures to bring their ideas and so one of the things that I have always tried to do in my career is form collaborations with different people from different places with different backgrounds so I'm basically an international guy I'm British but I'm living in the United States and I have many many interested colleagues around the world that have become friends over time. Critical capabilities for telecommunications so this list is something which we all hang our future credibility on right designing systems that are secured by design retrofitting security is not a good idea you need to to actually design security writing from the very beginning we want to basically make sure that we can assure the networks of working properly and that they're resilient they meet the targets for availability and an uptime we want automated fault management these are vast scale infrastructures so we want to make sure that if anything goes wrong we are able to detect that quickly and remedy it automatically preferably without any manual intervention this all sounds really motherhood and apple pie but these are critical things they're not easy to do they're not easy to implement and then for telecommunications we want deterministic performance we don't want to click on something and wait five seconds absolutely want throughput that we promised our customers we want the latency the delay from going one end to another end of a network and the timing to be communicated all the way through to the endpoint and there's this thing called jitter which I won't go into but it's basically the the timing variations that happen in in small intervals of time and then this is something that for the open source community is very important how do we make sure that features persist from release to release if we fork the software for example into proprietary form has that fork got the the feature that we need that we actually implemented and required in our network and indeed have deployed and there's some horror stories where open source communities dropped a feature the update was applied to the network and then the network stopped working all sounds pretty obvious but these things happen and then we want seamless software updates so said this once already no downtime and it's something else to bear in mind is in in in the commercial world most software's license of course there are open source licenses and they are all they're all present in many of the software systems that we deploy but we must make sure that we understand what licenses are applicable and that we actually pay for those resilience I'd like to make a few a few remarks here about resilience first of all software running on low cost standard hardware can be made highly resilient right so I think that probably pretty obvious for you guys you can deploy your Kubernetes cluster on one system and and have a backup in another system and if one system goes down you can switch over to the backup so and once you're in the software environment there's lots of novel things you can do to enhance resilience software systems can be designed to be largely immune from multiple simultaneous hardware failures and that's because we can do these novel redundancy schemes a colleague of mine and entity docomo for example Tetsuya Nakamura who's now with Amazon Web Services Tetsuya worked on a system in Japan after Fukushima disaster where most of the of the mobile network in Japan was taken down due to overload and he designed a resilient system based on NFV which actually migrated the core network within 30 minutes to to another data center 100 miles away so we can have very very large geographic redundancy using software some of the key issues for the for the telecoms industry security we all know about vulnerabilities we all know about the elimination of Huawei from from many country systems because they're Chinese that's pretty controversial I actually owned the relationship with Huawei when I was a BT and they're a good company but nonetheless that's the perception and so the supply chain has been damaged to some extent by perceptions of security vulnerability there is a shortage of people in the telecoms industry with hybrid skills we need telecoms people that can write software we need software people that understand telecoms and there's a big hint about future career opportunities for those of you that are thinking about your career telecommunications could be a good place if you've got some really good software skills but you'll need to get some telecom knowledge um lack of diversity of running code if everybody's using the same code and it's hacked and there's a and there's an attack everybody goes down this is where software diversity is really important um and that's one of the advantages of proprietary software somebody's code is different from someone else's code if everybody uses the same open source release everybody's code is the same the complexity of integration that's something which I'm not going to go into here maybe that's a a a topic for another talk basically bringing all these systems together different vendors onto a common platform um is complex and uh and there's a question in the industry who does that and indeed that's probably one of the big barriers at the moment to software and migration of telecommunications networks I'm particularly interested in the lack of diversity in the ecosystem the problem with the ecosystem is that not too many people want to come into telecoms because the the time scales for deployment are so long that there's not a an ROI for uh for for many small vendors that that meets their investor's requirements um all of that sounds all very nice and there's a bunch of work that we've done in etsy and a v that looks into resilience so for all of you that are interested in reliability and resilience um there's some really good work there um fault management just a few say a few things about this and I'm conscious of time uh fault management is really really important for network operators probably number one after security um we need to be able to deploy virtual network functions from different vendors onto a common platform and fault assure them so good fault management requires ability to detect filter and correlate and what we don't want to do is overload the infrastructure with fault management telemetry so yes we can instrument everything we can monitor everything but what happens to all of that data when it gets abstracted up to two operations so there's some very interesting work that's been going on there to try and figure out how we can use nmv to uh to assure networks and have some novel techniques for analysis um a little bit more about resilience we we know from the hardware world that we have this thing called the bathtub curve um at the beginning of the product's lifetime there are there are hardware bugs that get ironed out and over time um the hardware starts to deteriorate might be the battery in your phone and we see this kind of end of life wearout it may be surprising to know that software actually has some kinds of these features uh when we're doing test and debug we've got a lot of problems with bugs and the software may crash and that means it's not very reliable as we go time we shoot time we shoot updates we we fix bugs uh but in fixing the the bugs we introduce another bug so you have this kind of curve um where you you do software release the software crashes because you introduce a new bug you fix that then you do another release and then you get another bug so you see this rather interesting curve and so this is one of the things which we we're concerned about in telecommunications we want predictability so how do we make sure that when we do software updates we don't get an unreliable network um and there are some ways to to to mitigate that one of the things this thing called uh end version programming which is to say that we have a number of software functions that are anomaly identical uh but only one uh if one of those is faulty for example it has been hacked then we want to make sure that the others are the ones that control the in let's say for example it's controlling the aircraft um you don't want your aircraft to go down because um there's a bug in the aviation system so a number of different things that can be introduced there uh this is my last but one slide um the ecosystems are very very complex and first thing that happens in telecommunications is that if we want to do something completely new like for example 5G um then we get together with a bunch of other people in the industry we have a discussion what what do we want to do and can we converge um all of our requirements so we have a number of industry forums in in telecommunications this is a very small number of them they're actually a lot more than this and these guys get together and they figure out what it is they want in the future then they form uh or go to an existing standards body and they do some specification work um in the case of 5G a lot of specification work is done in 3GPP um in the broadband world a lot of it was done in the broadband forum uh in the ethernet world you know all those IEEE specs that you know and love they're done in metro ethernet forum and the IEEE so those are really important but then when it comes to actually implementation how can we accelerate that and this is where open source comes in really handy because open source communities get really interested in how they can make very quick progress on on code and so we have uh the potential for innovation in the open source communities I've got Kubernetes up there um but also open source can be used to validate some of the specs so some of the work going on for example in OP NFE was about validation of the FC NFE specs when it comes to the products then we've got of course the vendors need to get involved in this because they're selling products to the end users um let's not forget that the customers that are buying this stuff are the network operators the telecommunications operators and uh and then one of the things which doesn't sometimes get neglected is where do we get the people from we get them from academia we get them from the communities um and so research and new skills are being um produced in academia that's all great um and I'm just going to make a few closing remarks so that we can hand off to some q and a um if you guys have got questions um the pandemic we're all suffering aren't we're all at home and uh you know the first the keynote was fascinating to me to to figure out how you how you build communities and maintain communities while we're all locked down in our homes in and in our respective countries the exciting thing about software is you can write code anywhere um you can be anywhere and write code and you can be anywhere and contribute code um to the communities um anybody who can write code but not everybody can write useful code right so what what does the code do uh is it any good um documents and this is something which is no bug bear for me right um I've written a lot of software in my time um and I've had to um try and figure out how somebody else's software worked and when I opened up the source code there was no comments nothing no documentation and literally go through line by line and try and figure out what this software is doing and so documenting your code is very boring but think about those who are assigned to update your code in the future and and that's something which I I know is is is terribly boring uh but critical and then when it comes to um getting a job or or getting a new job how can you stand out from the rest this is a big question uh and can you develop a coding skill that is in short supply this is not about learning python this is about what do you do with the code um and so some of the examples where I think we've got shortages and opportunities for those of you that are looking to towards your future career um telecom needs software developers to understand networks so telecom needs software developers who understand networks so what do I mean by understanding networks that's doing some basic telecommunications courses um this is about figuring out how routers work um how do switches work how do telecommunications packet processors work um software developers who understand security architectures are in very high demand if you've got some security background and you understand security architectures and you can you can teach yourself a lot of this stuff but hopefully get some certifications as well then there's going to be a lot of demand for your skills and then um this is particularly true in the research environment um software developers with physics and maths in my career I've seen a lot of physics and mathematicians actually switch to becoming software developers because in the end to implement your algorithm you needed uh you needed to write some code um and who better to write the code than the guy that wrote the algorithm so that's something which uh to bear in mind um and then big Raoul and I as Raoul said at the very beginning we've been we've been friends very long time um and I'm interested to explore particularly after the pandemic when it's becoming clear to the world that people can make useful contributions anywhere in the world um and they're every bit as good um as some as another places so how can we explore how to make the talent in in El Salvador and Central America available to to the rest of us in the world and and uh and I'm interested to explore that I'm the on the organizing committee of the IEEE NFE and SDN conference and this is the sixth year and last year we were fully virtual because of the pandemic in November we were going to go to Madrid but because we were virtual we were able to invite papers from all over the world without the requirement for the person submitting the paper to have to travel to the conference travel is expensive attending the conference expensive so for the first time we had a PhD student in Panama who contributed to our conference and that person would almost certainly not have been able to submit the paper because they couldn't afford to go to Madrid um to present it so that's uh that's it from me um there's a few useful links um on the final slide and um thank you thank you thank you for listening over to you Raul thank you uh done we have some questions and uh I'm going to combine uh a couple of questions have to do with NFB uh with NFB and also uh let me see cnf uh loud native functions and so the question is why why cnfs and on the same question is more about like I'm curious to the impact of internalization in terms of NFB performance access to underlying hardware in complex networks architectures yeah um how can I say this um in cloud net um cloud native functions cnfs are no different from virtual network functions virtual network functions or vnfs is the industry standard term in telecoms that hasn't changed you can't go into a telecoms environment and start talking about cnfs and say that they're different from vnfs vnfs and cnfs are the same um but as we've gone through time the original NFB white paper in 2012 there weren't there was no cloud cloud native one thing if you're a cloud person you lived in a cloud native environment but now that now that you're a telecom person you're living in a network environment we only understood things like virtual machines we understood about virtual machines and so in our estimation you create a virtual network function within a virtual machine and everything will be great but then over time we realized that's very inefficient because now we can use cloud native techniques particularly things like microservices and so how do we now implement um network functions in a cloud environment was always the intention so the cloud guys took our took our concept and said well we don't want vnfs we want cnfs well that's completely wrong cnfs are vnfs vnfs are cnfs they're interchangeable but coming back to i think the second part of the question um on on the useful link screen um there is a uh a a a a document that's been published by ad cnfv which talks about um how vnf management um can operate in a cloud native environment so this doesn't change the underlying concept of virtual network functions at all it's simply that how do you efficiently implement these things in a cloud native environment while the framework the architectural framework of the system doesn't change it's simply that you're implementing it using cloud native techniques so that's a useful place to start um and if any of you've got any questions after you after you read that or you look into this topic a bit more get in touch with me and i can put you in touch with some of the experts that are working on uh virtual network functions um in cloud native environments using kubernetes kubernetes is the standard way to do these things now yeah don't don't please consider joining the kubernetes uh committee day of Salvador LinkedIn group as well we already have some some participants there and so that would be a good way for them to reach out to you too yep great by all means yeah sure there are two more questions one of them is um i would like to also hear your thoughts on open ran okay um i like i like open ran because it's open um but open ran um particularly um is being supported very strongly by four global carriers particularly european ones um who are um stating clearly that open ran is the direction for their future radio access networks deuter telecom telephonica orange um are the are of of three uh there's four and vocophone so those guys just announced um two weeks ago that you know open ran is the is the future direction um so there's no question open ran is an important um dynamic but there are challenges to make open ran um to be exactly the vision that the open ran community wants it to be um i don't um so i i like open ran but i think there are a lot of challenges for open ran to deliver the full openness vision um because uh first of all there the specifications for open ran are are not particularly um well defined uh and so that means that interoperability between the components the du the r u may be problematic and operators must have interoperability um the idea that you can have an open ecosystem is fantastic and i'm very much involved in open ecosystems but each player in the ecosystem needs to be able to see a path to business and i've actually put a link um this isn't in the version i sent you around at the bottom yeah we've got this thing called the telecom ecosystem group which i'm a co-founder okay what we're trying to do there is encourage startups to come into telecoms and it's obvious that 5g and all of the things with 5g including open ran and the core network are going to be huge opportunities for um the industry um and the pandemic has only accelerated um that um but the challenges remain right so i would say in summary i like open ran i think there are challenges to deliver the full openness vision unless the operators in particular take very strong action to define the interfaces and specifications so that there is interoperability between all of these entities not just the network layer the control layers um hope that answers your question in a very vague way great uh look Leonardo Murillo also wants to know uh the following um the role of uh site reliability engineering with um concepts such as error budget and service level objectives in the context of telco what was the what was the first the first part your thoughts in terms of the role of sre which is site reliability engineering with concepts such as error budgets and service level objectives in the context of telco i can't answer that um i'm not familiar enough with that with that okay um i can find somebody that can answer that question if you want to contact me afterwards okay thank you uh there is let me see one more or a couple more let me see if it's related so so so for an objective career outlook cloud and uh security plus telecom combine our skills in high demand would you say that uh is where we're heading post pandemic and this is uh Benjamin Lopez what was the last part of that comment Ron uh would you say that this is where we are heading post pandemic mm-hmm post-COVID in terms of career objectives whether it is cloud plus security plus telecom yeah absolutely so no question now that um most most analysts now believe that the pandemic has kickstarted a new a new era of remote working so uh if you look at articles in Forbes for example they are talking about a significant uh retention of remote working as being normal um that means we need richer communications right zoom uh and and the other applications have have accelerated their their their user friendliness we're using bevy which i notice for example we click backwards and forwards to the agenda one the issues i think that was uh brought up by the first keynote speaker was how do we ensure their serendipity you know we how do we interact with each other in a remote environment for our conference um last uh november we try to have a social event and we try to mimic people moving around the conference uh for example you've got an agenda you click on join right and you can have multiple rooms that's great but it's not it's still not there is it so how can we make the the experience better that's going to require um avatar um 3d environments richer experiences uh and so that is going to put more emphasis on telecommunications and also on security right we know zoom for example is compromised at the very beginning um some very bad things happened in zoom they quickly released um secured secured um encryption and waiting rooms and things like that just an example we're just at the very beginning so telecommunications operators are very much aware now that they have a big opportunity to create the the mechanisms by which we can have these these these experiences and i'm excited about it because we can now bring in to our industry people that live in central america as if they're living in working in the next building right so so this is exciting time so yeah i think i think telecoms is going to demand more uh software developers with the with the right skills having said that right the infrastructure you know the you know the the wireless network or the or the cable network that's not going to change overnight right i'm talking about most of the telecoms execs are talking about how does telecoms move up the value stack right yeah so we're not talking about open ran we're talking about what runs over open ran that's not google it's AT&T so they want they want these rich experiences to be owned by the telecoms guys not necessarily by by facebook um instagram and and tiktok yeah that requires these skills to come into the industry so i think you will see that happening yeah thank you uh done um i know that we can uh we have the privilege to continue we can continue the conversation here however there is another session in progress right now about soft skills and some of the participants probably would find that one also great that's great that's great thanks that's going to be in spanish thank you done for sharing your knowledge and walking to the community um also you need to know that we have the community and you can present uh there as well you know uh we have meetings once once a month and so now now now now we know what to find you okay and if it's a topic you want me to find somebody that else can talk on oh well then i'd probably know somebody that could do that okay great glad to ask and uh have a good day please please uh stick with that for the rest of the to the conference yeah i'm going to join the other group thank you bye bye