AT&T has made some waves in the industry with its ECOMP software management architecture but does it go far enough to address the challenges of cloud native VNFs? ECOMP is basically an attempt for AT&T to drive more automation into its operations. And AT&T has set some very aggressive goals of 75% virtualization of its infrastructure by 2020. ECOMP is intended by AT&T to be “more” than MANO, because its intent is to deliver a high level of end-to-end, cross-domain orchestration and therefore transform AT&T businesses and cost structure. However, while ECOMP is moving toward that end-to-end view, we have seen little that suggests that AT&T and its suppliers have made significant progress on re-architecting and de-composing VNFs to be truly cloud-native. We believe this is a critical step, because higher availability, better capex utilization and greater automation are driven from principles of cloud-native that allow the platform to optimize itself. This increases capacity utilization, allows for proactive healing, and entirely takes humans and higher-level orchestration out of significant segments of the lifecycle process. ECOMP orchestration is more advanced than simple VNF instantiation because it factors in integration of legacy OSS/BSS which will be around for a long time. But […]