Automating NFV/SDN Service Lifecycle
Key Points
- Service providers today struggle with high upfront costs and lengthy (12‑18 month) rollouts because traditional network services are complex, inflexible, and require extensive manual integration.
- SDN and NFV enable programmable, on‑demand virtualized services, but the resulting ecosystems of many interdependent virtual network functions across multiple data centers increase operational complexity.
- Managing the full lifecycle of these software components—maintenance, upgrades, scaling, and migration—still relies on costly human effort, breaking the “factory” model of automated service delivery.
- IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager automates these operations, orchestrating component dependencies, self‑healing failures, and lifecycle tasks to lower total cost of ownership, reduce errors, and accelerate the creation of personalized, agile network services.
Full Transcript
# Automating NFV/SDN Service Lifecycle **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMD9kI2x8to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMD9kI2x8to) **Duration:** 00:02:49 ## Summary - Service providers today struggle with high upfront costs and lengthy (12‑18 month) rollouts because traditional network services are complex, inflexible, and require extensive manual integration. - SDN and NFV enable programmable, on‑demand virtualized services, but the resulting ecosystems of many interdependent virtual network functions across multiple data centers increase operational complexity. - Managing the full lifecycle of these software components—maintenance, upgrades, scaling, and migration—still relies on costly human effort, breaking the “factory” model of automated service delivery. - IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager automates these operations, orchestrating component dependencies, self‑healing failures, and lifecycle tasks to lower total cost of ownership, reduce errors, and accelerate the creation of personalized, agile network services. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMD9kI2x8to&t=0s) **Complexity of Modern Service Provider Networks** - The passage explains how traditional network deployments are slow, inflexible, and costly, and argues that SDN/NFV automation is essential to efficiently create, manage, and evolve distributed virtual network functions across multiple data centers throughout a product’s lifecycle. ## Full Transcript
in the fast-paced dynamic world we live
in today service providers face many
challenges as they look to generate more
revenue and improve operational
efficiency they need to provide
automated on-demand and flexible
virtualized services to meet customers
evolving demands historically network
services have been designed and deployed
in a complex fashion with limited
flexibility this results in large
upfront investments and requires many
resources to integrate test and rollout
new services which can take anywhere
from 12 to 18 months now with the
automation derived by Software Defined
Networking or Sdn and network functions
virtualization or NFV service providers
can create highly programmable networks
to allow for the fast creation of new
complex and personalized services
products and services are complex made
of varying virtual network functions or
many small pieces of software the
service providers want to buy and
assemble using the cloud these in turn
are all interconnected and can be
dependent on each other
if one should fail they can all fail to
add to the complexity the software
components that are used to create the
products are hosted within multiple data
centers or clouds throughout the
lifecycle of a product all of these
software components need to be
maintained upgraded fixed scaled up or
down or move to different data centers
as end-user requirements change today's
traditional operations require people to
maintain a product throughout its
lifecycle this is costly and breaks the
factory model automation is key to
simplifying operations and managing the
complexity to allow for more complex and
personalized services to be created IBM
agile lifecycle manager automates manual
operations by instructing all of the
product elements to work together
managing their lifecycle in order of
dependency and ensuring that any damaged
components are replaced or healed
without human interaction
this lowers the total cost of ownership
required to manage the entire lifecycle
of the products and services and
decreases the margin of error the
scaling the factory automated operations
is key to operationalizing NFV and Sdn
and achieving those expected benefits of
higher service agility and lower
operational expense with IBM agile
lifecycle manager service providers can
effectively streamline service delivery
minimize complexity and deliver
innovative new services to customers
today and into the future for more
information about IBM agile lifecycle
manager please visit our webpage