There is an exponential proliferation of interconnected smart objects, both static and mobile, serving different use cases and vertical markets. Against this backdrop, service providers and their users have increasingly heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements that must be maintained to avoid economic penalties. The complexity of managing the ICT operations to meet the unpredictable, fluctuating and mobile demand of these smart objects is putting a strain on existing cloud computing and network infrastructure that was not designed for this purpose. It is no longer realistic for ICT teams to cost-effectively foresee and manage manually the reliable capacity provisioning of all possible configurations, component interactions, and end-user operations from the cloud to the edge on a detailed level. New concepts and technologies are required for the automated orchestration of applications and the end-to-end management of networking infrastructure and workload placement from the cloud to the edge.

This white paper describes a model-based framework for automated optimisation whereby near real-time and future application placement and infrastructure optimisation from the cloud to the edge is achieved, balancing application provider and infrastructure provider interests, and optimising the placement of resources and functionality to improve performance and reduce costs.

This market briefing provides an overview of the market for SDN and NFV, primarily from the perspective of industry reports. The following sections provide a summary of SDN and NFV and their benefits. Major trends and drivers for SDN and NFV adoption are discussed and an overview of the SDN and NFV market is presented including major segments, vendors and standards development organisations. Barriers to SDN/NFV adoption and future challenges arising out of the Internet for Everything and 5G networks are then briefly discussed. The briefing paper concludes with an overview of how the European Union Horizon 2020 project RECAP is profiling and simulating network infrastructure so that network function and service function characteristics can be automated to ensure required quality of service and mitigate failure risk in a variety of cloud, fog and edge computing use cases.

This market briefing provides an overview of the main open source cloud simulation software tools. It discusses the drivers for using simulation and modelling for cloud computing, the types of cloud problems simulators are being used to solve. It provides an overview of the main open source cloud simulators and a comparison of the features of these simulators. This is followed by an overview of a new open source warehouse-scale cloud simulator that accommodates hyperscale clouds and next generation cloud architecture designs, and a discussion about how simulation-based optimisation might be used to address cloud management challenges with the emergence of the Internet of Things.