Network as a Service: The New Vista of Opportunities

TL;DR

The paper discusses the shift towards 'Network as a Service' (NaaS), driven by cloud computing, SDN, and virtualization, promising more flexible, innovative, and simplified network management.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of NaaS and highlights how emerging technologies are enabling a major paradigm shift in networking.

Findings

NaaS is poised to become the dominant network deployment mode.

Emerging technologies facilitate innovation and simplify network management.

Synergistic growth of cloud, SDN, and virtualization enhances NaaS adoption.

Abstract

The networking industry, compared to the compute industry, has been slow in evolving from a closed ecosystem with limited abstractions to a more open ecosystem with well-defined sophisticated high level abstractions. This has resulted in an ossified Internet architecture that inhibits innovation and is unnecessarily complex. Fortunately, there has been an exciting flux of rapid developments in networking in recent times with prominent trends emerging that have brought us to the cusp of a major paradigm shift. In particular, the emergence of technologies such as cloud computing, software defined networking (SDN), and network virtualization are driving a new vision of `networking as a service' (NaaS) in which networks are managed flexibly and efficiently cloud computing style. These technologies promise to both facilitate architectural and technological innovation while also simplifying commissioning, orchestration, and composition of network services. In this article, we introduce our readers to these technologies. In the coming few years, the trends of cloud computing, SDN, and network virtualization will further strengthen each other's value proposition symbiotically and NaaS will increasingly become the dominant mode of commissioning new networks.