The telecommunications industry is at a pivotal moment, with significant business opportunities and technical challenges in building and delivering 5G services using hyperscaler infrastructures. Major communication service providers are working towards integrating their on-premise infrastructure with commoditized cloud computing to create scalable and accessible 5G solutions. Despite the unique approaches each provider takes, there is a pressing need for an open 5G solution blueprint that leverages common solution elements and open-source technologies, capable of working across multiple hyperscaler infrastructures.
Cloud-native is an architectural approach that focuses on building and running applications to fully leverage the advantages of cloud computing models. Cloud-native applications are designed to take full advantage of the cloud's elasticity, scalability, and resilience. In essence, cloud-native refers to the design, development, deployment, and operational methodologies used to build applications that can thrive in the cloud environment.
- Microservices Architecture: Applications are composed of small, independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs. This allows for greater agility, scalability, and fault tolerance.
- Containerization: Each microservice is packaged in its own container, providing consistency across environments and simplifying deployments.
- Dynamic Orchestration: Containers are dynamically managed by orchestrators such as Kubernetes, ensuring efficient resource usage and automated scaling.
- Declarative Infrastructure: The infrastructure is defined as code, enabling automated and consistent deployment across environments.
For the telecom industry, adopting a cloud-native approach is not just about modernization; it is essential for maintaining competitiveness in the face of rapidly evolving technology and customer demands. Cloud-native principles enable telecom operators to:
- Enhance Agility: By decoupling services and automating deployment processes, telecom operators can respond more quickly to market changes and customer needs.
- Achieve Scalability: Cloud-native architectures allow telecom networks to scale horizontally to meet varying demands, especially critical in 5G networks with fluctuating traffic loads.
- Improve Resilience: The microservices-based architecture reduces the impact of individual service failures, thereby enhancing the overall resilience of the network.
- Reduce Costs: By leveraging cloud infrastructure, telecom operators can reduce the capital expenditure associated with traditional data centers and scale operations on-demand.
Kubernetes (K8s) has become the de facto standard for orchestrating containerized applications. It plays a critical role in cloud-native telco environments due to its ability to:
- Automate Deployment and Scaling: Kubernetes manages the deployment, scaling, and operation of containerized applications, ensuring that telecom services are always available and can meet demand.
- Provide Multi-Cluster Management: In a telco environment, Kubernetes supports multi-cluster deployments, which is essential for managing distributed 5G Core networks across multiple locations.
- Enable Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Kubernetes integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, enabling frequent, automated deployments of network functions, which is vital for maintaining service continuity and reliability.
Service mesh technology, such as Istio, provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture. It is crucial in telco networks for several reasons:
- Traffic Management: Service mesh controls the flow of traffic between microservices, offering advanced features like load balancing, traffic splitting, and retries, which are essential for optimizing network performance.
- Security: It provides built-in security features such as mutual TLS, enabling secure communication between services without requiring changes to the application code.
- Observability: Service mesh offers deep insights into service behavior with metrics, logs, and tracing, which are critical for maintaining and troubleshooting complex telecom networks.
5G adoption rates vary across offerings such as Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) for consumers and businesses, edge deployments for latency-sensitive applications, and dedicated infrastructure for enterprises via network slicing. Expanding 5G coverage requires service providers to balance the significant financial burdens of capital expenditures (capex) and operational expenditures (opex). To meet diverse use cases with minimal capex and opex, an adaptable, on-demand, and pay-as-you-consume infrastructure is essential.
The 5G solution stack can be categorized into four main components: infrastructure, application platform, 5G applications, and management & orchestration. The infrastructure provides the necessary compute, network, and storage resources, while the application platform accommodates 5G applications with features like declarative state consistency, scaling, healing, and monitoring. The management and orchestration layer ensures dynamic scaling and efficient operation across multiple locations.
The infrastructure layer is composed of services and resources provided by cloud service providers. These include core services such as compute, network, storage, infrastructure sub-utilities (e.g., NTP source), additive network functions (e.g., firewalls, load balancers), and add-on software services such as identity management and infrastructure automation toolboxes. Despite the similarities among hyperscalers, the access methodologies, or APIs, vary, adding complexity to the management of different stacks. Application platform installers and management toolboxes can mitigate this complexity by introducing infrastructure agnosticism.
The application platform is the core engine that runs the 5G application stack. Key components include container execution and orchestration platforms, application sub-utilities (dashboards, APIs, pluggable resources), and additive DevOps and platform-management toolboxes. This platform is not a singleton instance but a distributed, highly available, and resilient open-source software stack.
5G applications can be subcategorized into:
- Core Network Functions (CNFs): These include essential network functions like the Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), Session Management Function (SMF), and User Plane Function (UPF).
- Supplementary Functions: These include functions that enhance the capabilities of the core network, such as Network Exposure Function (NEF) and Network Slice Selection Function (NSSF).
- Management Functions: These involve the orchestration and management of the network, including functions like the Network Repository Function (NRF) and the Policy Control Function (PCF).
By the nature of communication solutions, the availability of 5G Core can be enhanced with multi-location deployment and location-aware access enablement to allow dynamic resource allocation and management. Multiple platform instances are required to host 5G application stacks, ensuring smooth and consistent platform creation, management, and application stack delivery. Leveraging the GitOps pattern, which uses Git as a single source of truth, is crucial for achieving homogeneous and scalable 5G Core across on-premise and hyperscaler environments.
- Case Study 1: Verizon Wireless: Verizon Wireless utilized Kubernetes to modernize its core network functions. By containerizing these functions and deploying them on Kubernetes, Verizon achieved significant improvements in scalability and operational efficiency. The automation capabilities of Kubernetes allowed for streamlined operations, reducing the time required for network upgrades and maintenance.
- Case Study 2: Deutsche Telekom: Deutsche Telekom leveraged Kubernetes to build a flexible and scalable platform for its 5G network. The adoption of a microservices architecture and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices enabled faster 5G rollout and improved agility in network operations.
- Case Study 3: Rakuten Mobile: Rakuten Mobile embraced Kubernetes to create a fully virtualized mobile network. The flexibility and cost-efficiency of Kubernetes allowed Rakuten to deploy network functions on commodity hardware, reducing capital expenditure and operational costs. The automation and orchestration capabilities enabled rapid deployment of new services and responsiveness to changing customer demands.
The modernization of Telco applications using Kubernetes, service mesh, data mesh, OTel, and eBPF represents a strategic shift towards more agile, scalable, and efficient network operations. This chapter has laid the foundation for understanding the key components and benefits of this transformation. In the following chapters, we will delve deeper into specific technologies and their practical applications, showcasing real-world implementations and best practices.