ABSTRACT
Network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) two efforts combine to create a new environment for deploying and scaling services. Control and management of this environment requires new software ecosystems for service creation, orchestration, and marshalling of resources and services, configuration, and full life-cycle management. This chapter explains how the worlds of cloud technology, NFV, and SDN combined to create this new networking environment and discusses one of the major areas of innovation and disruption: network artificial intelligence (AI), the application of AI to this ecosystem. It discusses how the NFV and SDN ecosystems provide the means to enable network AI and describes an overall architecture. Software-defined networking and NFV together address the challenges of rapidly increasing traffic, services on demand, and closed-loop management and control. Closed-loop control can be used to provide high degrees of automation in support of Operational Expense (OpEx) reduction by eliminating manual processes in managing various aspects of the network.
