Toward Cloud-Native VNFs: An ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration Standards Approach

Network functions virtualization (NFV) is becoming the norm for deploying network functions and managing their lifecycles. While the vast majority of NFV deployments so far have been focusing on hosting virtualized network functions in virtual machines managed by hypervisors, container-based virtualization is gaining momentum in the NFV ecosystem and has become the technology of choice for virtualizing 5G networks. This article provides an overview of the evolution of ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration standards to cope with the rise of container technologies.