Cloud Native Computing Foundation: People, Processes and Tools for the Cloud Native Telco

With a goal to apply the principles and practices of Cloud Native Computing to the telco world naturally the industry body central to this core expertise has much to offer the process.

Part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation the CNCF – Cloud Native Computing Foundation, brings together the world’s top developers, end users, and vendors to advance uptake of the trend through accelerating open source projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and many others.

Cloud Native Telco

They have undertaken much work to map their expertise to the telco sector and offer a wealth of resources and projects.

Setting the scene back in 2018 they introduced the Telco Networking Journey to Cloud Native, as part of reaching out to telcos, providing this overview of their telco initiatives. In this webinar and this article they describe People, Processes and Tools for the Cloud Native Telco.

Working under a keynote theme of defining an End to End 5G Cloud Native Network, they organize a number of project groups relevant to this goal and tackling specific use cases, such as how to achieve End to End Observability, Kubernetes at the Edge and Building the Cloud Native Telco with Network Service Mesh, with one presentation from VMware and one from Ericsson.

An important project is the CNF Testbed. Standing for Cloud Native Network Function, they are intended to address the challenges of VNFs, Virtual Network Functions, by using containers instead of VMs, explained in this presentation and at this user group session.

Priyanka Sharma, CNCF Executive Director, looks further still, going Beyond Containers: The Future of Cloud Native.

Deutsche Telekom

This great presentation from Deutsche Telekom offers an exemplar of all this work in action, where they built a Kubernetes cluster to manage their roll out of 5G.