Cloud-Native is a design philosophy involving developing and running applications that utilize the benefits of the cloud computing delivery model for applications existing in public or private on-premises cloud networks. To highlight the value and challenges of Cloud-Native, 5G Americas today announced the publication of a white paper titled, 5G and the Cloud.
The white paper introduces these Cloud-Native concepts, explains how they will change 5G networks, identifies challenges that remain in the adoption of Cloud-Native, and offers some solutions in the form of reference architectures produced by standards organizations, as well as other recommendations on the path towards network operator adoption.
Cloud-Native concepts offer several key advantages that can accelerate the development and enhancement of wireless network features and capabilities. These include many modern techniques used by Cloud Computing, including Containerization, Micro-Services, Control-User Plane Separation, Service Mesh, Continuous Integration and Delivery, and DevOps or application development-operations.
Chris Pearson, President, 5G Americas said, “Developers are in the process of using fully automated continuous integration to test and push new codes and concepts to production. Cloud Native is going to enable enterprises and telecom sector to bring newer ideas to production in a reduced time and improved innovation capability.”
The 5G and the Cloud white paper highlights:
- The definition of Cloud-Native for the wireless industry
- The ETSI-based Network Function Virtualization and Cloud Native network functions in a 5G framework
- Considerations for implementation and migration of their 5G Core Network
- The essential Cloud Native challenges and opportunities
In addition to examining the road to a Cloud Native 5G core, the white paper also identifies the rich open source-supporting ecosystem that has enabled the Cloud Native approach to build and run applications that fully exploit the benefits of the cloud computing model. This model includes services architectures, infrastructure-as-code, automation, continuous integration/delivery pipelines, monitoring tools, and more.
The 5G and the Cloud white paper also identifies the requirements of 5G, as well as how the Cloud-Native model is applied to them with details into migration strategies, best practices and deployment approaches.
Sam Samuel of Cisco and co-leader of the white paper project said, “The road to cloud-native must be broken into phases, as operators will require deploying 5G core networks on a properly configured and controlled Cloud-Native stack. This is a significant task that may require the re-architecting and re-tooling network functions for cloud native operation.”
Milind Gunjan of Sprint and co-leader of the project added, “Cloud-native technologies will empower organizations to deploy and scale network functions more quickly and generate new services and revenue streams. We’re excited for the industry to focus on building a common, open, cloud-native platform and toolkit that can be easily and effectively adopted. But like all new technology concepts, time is needed for the network function architecture to evolve and cloud-native ecosystem to mature.”
The paper is available for free download on the 5G Americas website. Blog post by Chris Pearson, and presentation slides are also featured on the 5G Americas website.
