Interview with Dave Neary of Red Hat, concerning OPNFV and its relationship with Open vSwitch.

Topics include:

• The difference between SFC and NFV.
• Importance performance constraints in NFV.
• Telcos and NFV, and how telcos approached OpenStack.
• How OPNFV bridges the telcos with OpenStack.
• What telcos care about, and a definition of “carrier grade.”
• Why carrier-grade features matter to everyone.
• Downsides and tradeoffs of carrier grade, such as cost and
  complexity.
• Role of Open vSwitch in OPNFV, and why DPDK is important to NFV.
• Importance of short 64-byte packets in NFV, e.g. for RTP (Real-time
  Transport Protocol, for delivering audio and video across networks).
• Relationship between SIP and RTP.
• Status of DPDK datapath in OVS for OPNFV (still under OpenStack review
  and in early evaluation, not running in production much).
• Importance of vhost-user for NFV.
• Why DPDK API/ABI changes cause trouble for Open vSwitch and downstream
  users, and how symbol versioning in DPDK 2 and later helps.
• Problems caused by irregularly scheduled Open vSwitch 2.4 and 2.5
  releases.
• Intent to branch OVS 2.6 in July.
• SFC for OPNFV demo with Tacker.
• Progress toward NSH support in OVS, and why OVS support for Geneve should
  make it easier now.
• Geneve standardization progress.
• OpenFlow matching for service chains.
• Potential pros and cons of NSH and Geneve for service chaining.
• VPP and OPNFV, and guesses at pros and cons of VPP versus OVS for
  different application.
• Why Dave is excited about OPNFV.

You can find Dave at @nearyd on Twitter.

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