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This section describes a demo scenario of a central office (CO) employing NFaaS as a deployment example.
This demo attempts to answer the following question: What will happen if NFaaS is brought into a service provider's network?
The hypothetical CO is shown in the following figure:
Today’s service provider’s central office is typically comprised of multiple networks and a variety of specialized hardware, each with their own management methods that aggravates OpEx. Having large numbers of specialized equipment is also a major source of CapEx. Worse yet, these networks' features are coupled to the types of hardware present, making the implementation and deployment of new services a slow process.
Employing NFaaS brings about several benefits to this central office:
- Simplified architecture - specialized middleboxes are replaced with commodity hardware i.e. uniform infrastructure.
- Reduced CapEx - the number of expensive, specialized components are replaced by commodity hardware and open source software.
- Decreased OpEx - through automation
- Flexibility - through infrastructure virtualization and the ability to manage functions at the service level