Orchestrating the Service Lifecycle

In 2021, MEF CTO Pascal Menezes walked us through the work MEF is doing on standardizing the enterprise network.

Nearly a year and a half later, Pascal is back on the pod to discuss what MEF has been doing since then.

Our first topic: Lifecycle Service Orchestration. What is it, how has it progressed, and what does it do for the carrier community?

We also get into enterprise automation, operational APIs, new SASE and ZT standards, and more.

This episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet ties in perfectly with last week's, when Orchest's Jeremy Villalobos—whom I actually met at an MEF event—helped me understand why automation is so important from a carrier perspective.

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Key Takeaways

• MEF is focused on automating the full lifecycle of network services across multiple service providers using a framework called Life Cycle Service Orchestration (LSO). This automation is designed to allow service providers to seamlessly provision, test, operate, and manage services, even when they require working with different wholesale partners around the globe. The aim is to deliver a "cloud-like experience" for enterprises, enabling near real-time service activation rather than taking months.
  
  
• MEF is expanding its standardization efforts beyond traditional connectivity (like Carrier Ethernet) to encompass newer, value-added services such as SD-WAN, SASE, zero trust, and edge computing. By creating common definitions and frameworks for these services, MEF helps the industry adopt them more uniformly and enables service providers to offer a comprehensive "secure network as a service" package that integrates connectivity, security, and multi-cloud access. This helps carriers provide more value and avoid simply becoming a "bit pipe" to hyperscalers.
  
  
• The automation and standardization work aims to make networks more programmable for enterprises and prepare for future digital transformation use cases. The idea is that enterprise developers, through code, could influence network behavior (like quality of service or security posture) based on application needs, rather than relying solely on administrator configurations. Looking ahead, emerging digital transformation applications like IoT, smart manufacturing, and connected vehicles will demand highly precise, automated, and secure networks, which is what MEF's current work is designed to enable.