Telecom core networks on containers

[SFleischman]

Note from Steven Fleischman – This blog is the third in a series of five written by HPE Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) addressing topics related to Tanzu and containers that will be discussed during the HPE Roundtable at VMworld 2020.

Session: “HPE Strategy with Tanzu for Containerizing Workloads.” (Session ID KUB3094S)

1. Americas region - September 29, 2020
   Time:  10:30-10:54  am PDT
   
   
2. EMEA region - September 30, 2020
   Time:  11:30-11:54 am CET (EMEA)

To attend this and other sessions at the event, we encourage you to register today.

Guest blogger: Tomotake Koike

Cloud-Native Network Function (CNF) among 5G core and other services in the telecom space, is gaining in popularity among telecom providers through leveraging containerized network functions and Kubernetes as platform.  This trend shows the importance and strong unique value proposition of Kubernetes to provide coexistence of both standardization of operation around the platform, as well as vendor-specific operation around network functions.

A telecommunications carrier (MNO) core network is rarely provided by one vendor from platform infrastructure to Network Function (NF), which is a group of network function applications.  The MNO collects and tests best of breed in the industry from quality and cost perspectives with multiple vendors to provide their service.  In the last 10 years, we have seen improvement of service quality and cost optimization because of the introduction and shift to NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), which has allowed more Virtual Network Function (VNF) vendors to operate in the market.

However, this situation has resulted in higher complexity of operation and management of core network from a lifecycle perspective. In order to efficiently provide lifecycle management (onboarding, instantiation, observability, healing, scaling, updating, backup, etc.) of NFs provided by vendors with different specifications and MNO carrier unique operations, it was crucial to have a flexible and modularized orchestration platform.

The 3GPP NFV-MANO specification was introduced to solve the issue of operational complexity. It is often considered that the operational complexity, including cases slowing down service introduction time frames, is more frequent than in the PNF (Physical NF) era due to increasing the complexity of the operating environment.  In order to reduce or eliminate the complexity faced by these carriers, Kubernetes is positioned as the industry standard orchestrator that provides flexibility and openness of interface / specification for MNO’s operation and management.

HPE Pointnext Services, along with HPE’s Communication and Media Service team works on a variety of container orchestration software to specifically reduce this complexity, bringing quality for the world’s MNO.

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Steven Fleischman
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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