NFV
Network Functions Virtualization: an architectural approach that decouples network functions from proprietary hardware, running them as software on commercial off-the-shelf servers.
NFV is the architectural move that separates network functions from the proprietary hardware they used to ship on, so they can run as software on commodity servers. Before NFV, scaling or adding a function often meant buying and installing more vendor appliances. With it, the function is software you deploy on a shared pool of compute, storage, and networking — much more like running any other workload in a data centre.
The framework that makes this manageable is NFV MANO (Management and Orchestration), which has three pieces worth knowing: the VIM managing the virtual infrastructure (compute/storage/network), the VNFM handling individual VNF lifecycles, and the NFVO orchestrating across functions and resources to compose network services. NFV is closely related to SDN but distinct — SDN is about programmable, centralised control of how traffic is steered, while NFV is about where the functions themselves run. The two are often used together, and NFV is a big part of why a cloud-native 5G core is even possible.
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