At this year’s OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, Verizon Comminications Inc. revealed how it’s pushing the edge with OpenStack with its “cloud-in-a-box” offering, based on OpenStack’s open-source cloud computing software and delivering computing at the edge of the network.

“OpenStack really gave us that consistent platform across both out at the edge and also within the core,” said Beth Cohen (pictured), cloud technology strategist at Verizon. Verizon is also building the hosted network services platform, used internally to support network services. It is also supporting customers on this same platform. Verizon achieved this feat by containerization of the OpenStack, on a single core.

To discuss how Verizon uses OpenStack for its new offering, as well as how network function virtualization is evolving tech, Cohen recently joined host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during OpenStack Summit. (* Disclosure below.)

Moving from appliances to NFV

“Verizon lives and breathes networks, and networks are WANs, wide area networks,” Cohen said.

Traditionally, cloud has been datacenter-centric, and the network stopped at a network-to-network router, she explained. However, companies like Verizon know what’s on the other side of that router, so what it has done is take the functionality that resides in the data center and expanded it out to the edge.

The move from appliances to software — NFV — is making clients completely rethink their network, which they have thought of as stacks of boxes, Cohen explained. Clients are asking themselves why they need six different boxes to do the same thing.

“Why don’t we just make it a cloud-in-a-box, put all those functions together, and service chain them. That gives you a lot more flexibility; you’re not stuck with that proprietary hardware,” Cohen said.

Clients are very interested in this for “technology refresh,” when they own equipment that is approaching end-of-life and is no longer vendor-supported. It’s a natural move for them to make, according to Cohen.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston. (* Disclosure: The OpenStack Foundation sponsored this OpenStack Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither the OpenStack Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE