Cloud Native Computing Foundation / Cloud Native Telco Day EU 2022

An Open Source Telco Cloud Stack to Accelerate the Adoption of Cloud Native Operator Model - Nevicato Guillaume & Mathieu Rohon, Orange

The Telco Cloud stack project showcases the value of a cloud-native, scalable, and automated Cloud infra. This Telco Cloud stack is built with open-source components and it fulfills the telco requirements. First Part, present the goal of the project to release a telco cloud stack to support 5G CNF (Cloud-native Network Functions) : Open RAN & 5G Core CNF. How will this initiative contribute to foster Cloud native infra for Telco purposes ? How will this initiative be interlocked with an existing ecosystem such as LF ANUKET or the O-RAN Alliance ? Why did the project choose to be Open Source released ? In which existing communities the development team will also directly contribute ? Second Part : demo based on a distributed Cloud Native federated lab across different Operators with several CNFs. The demo starts with an ANUKET conformance test of this cloud native infra as it is used to guarantee the conformance of the infra with telco requirements. Then we demonstrate a CNF Test suite of the CNCF, as it is a key verification to guarantee an efficient LifeCycleManagement TBC : demo showcases of Bare Metal opensource including Metal3 & Ironic to the Rancher stack.

Closing Remarks - Bill Mulligan, Isovalent

GitOps Based Cloud Native 5GC Lifecycle Management – Case Study Based on Mavenir 5GC Implementation in Deutsche Telekom Technik with Das Schiff (T-CaaS @ TDG) Platform - Michal Sewera & Samy Nitsche, Deutsche Telekom

Running a Kubernetes-based application does not mean it's cloud native. We get the real advantages of the cloud native ecosystem only when we implement a fully automated platform life cycle management system based on GitOps, automating implementation of so called “desired state of the network”. This talk will present lessons learned and experiences from the transformation to the GitOps NF lifecycle management model based on a case study of Mavenir 5G SA platform implementation at Deutsche Telekom Technik, focusing on:
- CICD infrastructure and implemented practices
- GitOps based configuration management for 5G applications
- Requirements to support infrastructure rolling upgrades
- Challenges and ideas to support ISSU without a need for a traffic migration

Lessons Learnt Developing and Deploying a Cloud Native Network Function - Paul Graham, Matrixx Software

Paul Graham will present MATRIXX Software’s experience with implementing a 5G ready Cloud Native Charging Function, the lessons learnt and how other organizations can replicate the success.The CHF has been validated in several public cloud providers along with the corresponding K8s variants.The CHF has several legacy network aspects,so the challenges of implementing these in the mentioned environments will be discussed along with pragmatic solutions. The details of issues that have been overcome such as providing carrier grade availability, incorporating into CI/CD environments, the migration from legacy networks, security, scaling as well as the changes required in process and mindset. Paul will also discuss developing a green field Cloud Native Function which was identified as a critical element required to aid the migration between 3G/4G and 5G networks. Several key design decisions were undertaken during its implementation which can be shared with the audience. Also, the CNF was validated using a test suite developed in collaboration with the Cloud Native Foundation, so the details of this will be discussed.The session will complete with a discussion on the lessons learnt.

Lessons Learnt and Thoughts on Telco Cloud Native Evolution and Open Source Practices - Seshu Kumar Mudiganti, Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd. & Qihui Zhao, China Mobile

With the maturity of 5G and the development of edge computing, operators have gradually transformed into network service providers. Providing agile, robust and flexible network cloud is operators' primary goal. Currently, together with vendors, operators are researching on cloud native methodologies and technologies, such as container, microservice and DevOps, and pushing network cloud evolving towards cloud native. The current session mainly highlights on the lessons we learnt from operating on various CNCF projects, OKD as part of the XGVela project, we will also present the current open source implementation of a PaaS platform, NF microservices, CNFs and other cloud native technical points. In this session, we will also introduce China Mobile's thoughts and practice on network cloud native evolution, clarify the evolution requirements.

Leveraging Cilium and SRv6 for Telco Networking - Daniel Bernier, Bell Canada

In this session, Daniel Bernier will be demonstrating how Cilium and its eBPF data plane was extended to support telco networking requirements in a cloud-native way. He will demonstrate how Cilium can provide network segmentation and Multi-VRF support with or without the use of multiple interfaces. With this new approach, he will also explain how to build simple multi-cluster VPN or simple integration to an MPLS provider network by leveraging natively IPv6 and SRv6.

Lightning Talk: 5G CNFs Observability Based on eBPF - Abderaouf Khichane & Ilhem Fajjari, Orange

Monitoring the traffic between the microservices of a 5G network service is of great interest, as the network service can only provide its functionality in most cases if several microservices are involved. In addition to ensuring that the state of the exchanges is good, tracking the exchanges between these microservices allows to retrieve global information on the state of the system. Several solutions in the open source ecosystem allow to track exchanges in microservices architectures. These solutions are generally based on service mesh technology and are more focused on handling exchanges based on protocols widely used in the IT world such as HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and gRPC. The use of such a model based on the injection of proxies that will coexist with the network service components will generate an overhead in the latency of the exchanges. The question is how to monitor the exchanges between the components of a 5G network service that are based on protocols widely used in IT such as HTTP/2 but also telco specific protocols such as NGAP, PFCP and NGAP without changing their source code and with a minimum overhead?

Lightning Talk: Architecting Geo-distributed and Hybrid 5G Edge with Kubernetes - Sachin Rathee, Red Hat & Robert Belson, Verizon

There’s been a lot of talk about "the edge" but what does that really mean in the context of your infrastructure and application architecture? With the proliferation of high-speed 5G networks, Verizon developed a mobile edge computing platform to support customer demands for increasingly immersive experiences. In this session, the Verizon and Red Hat will share our experiences with using Kubernetes on Verizon 5G Edge to orchestrate and schedule container deployments across hybrid clouds that may include public footprint with AWS Wavelength Zones and/or on premises AWS Outposts simultaneously. Moreover, learn how the edge discovery service can be used to support advanced deployment techniques and day 2 operations. Leave this session with an understanding of best practices for Kubernetes at the network edge and learn how to run an Kubernetes worker node on public/private edge for your ultra low-latency applications.

Lightning Talk: Lessons from Enabling Cloud Native O-RAN RIC for the Edge - Sunku Ranganath, Intel Corporation, Mike Recchia & Hanen Garcia, Red Hat

O-RAN RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) specs enable self-organizing networks to be deployed as microservices within K8s clusters with RAN AI capabilities. Instantiating key network functionalities in RAN AI applications (xApps & rApps) as K8s pods have arisen the need for customizing Kubernetes architecture to address resiliency, manageability and policy driven requirements for the O-RAN RIC. This talk addresses some of cloud-native considerations of O-RAN to efficiently enable RIC with RAN AI xApps and have the ability to interact with customized set of MEC microservices. Through a live demo using AI based Traffic Management xApp, telemetry based xApp manager & open-source RIC implementation, this talk provides architectural aspects necessary for integrating AI applications, interfaces required for scaling the data efficiently using K8s infrastructure. Importance of telemetry constructs are highlighted to adhere to the real-time requirements of the ORAN near-Realtime RIC pods through the demo.

Lightning Talk: NSM, Network Service Mesh at Scale for Telco Networking - Giang Tran, Ericsson & Lionel Jouin, Ericsson Software Technology

Network Service Mesh (NSM), a CNCF sandbox project, offers a framework for building network services that addresses current networking challenges for Telco Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) deployed on Kubernetes. What does this imply? And how can NSM be brought in for advanced use-cases? This speech will present a framework for network services extensions using NSM as foundation for addressing the networking challenges seen around Telco CNFs. Such CNFs inherently have high demands on networking capabilities such as VPN e2e network separation & isolation, connectivity through acceleration hardware, L3 forwarding and LB of Telco protocols as a Service (aaS). In addition, Telco CNFs require scalability and high availability. The design is realized by the open-source Meridio project published on GitHub. Issues related to NSM found during the implementation; and how they have been addressed by the community will be put forward.

Lightning Talk: eBPF based UPF (User Plane Function) for 5G - Aapo Poutanen, Cumucore & Eric Lajoie, Red Hat

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been used in the past years for efficient deployment of 4G and 5G network functions (NF) on the cloud. However, private industrial mobile networks have different requirements in terms of latency and connectivity. These requirements impact mainly the user plane. Thus, network functions handling the signaling can reside on the cloud but a new solution is required for managing the user plane on-premises to reduce latency and improve reliability. In this talk, we describe a novel design of the User Plane Function (UPF) based on eBPF framework available in Linux OS. Initial implementation and performance results of the eBPF based UPF will be shared during session.

Network Anomaly Event Prediction and Optimal Resource Control in Cloud Native Network Functions - Takuya Miyasaka, KDDI Corporation & Takaya Miyazawa, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

The use of Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) in the telco industry has attracted attention in recent years, and examples of CNFs adoption such as 5G and telco cloud have started to emerge. While CNFs enable quick service deployment, can typical requirements of telco service such as high availability and optimal allocation of the computational resource be realized in CNFs? In this session, we will share and discuss our experience in leveraging CNFs as an infrastructure for telco services while satisfying these typical requirements. Takuya Miyasaka will share lessons learned on eBPF observability in a 5G core network deployed by Kubernetes. In particular, he will show that the detailed metrics of each 5G container measured by eBPF enable the detection of future anomaly network events in the 5G with Deep Learning. From a different perspective, Takaya Miyazawa will share his ongoing activities on an autonomous computational resource control system for CNFs being compliant with the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) and ITU-T Y.3177 standards. In addition, he will share his work on deploying the control system in a Japanese public network testbed called JGN.

Opening Remarks - Tom Kivlin, Vodafone

Towards the Cloud Native Telco: Learning from the Trenches - Josua Hiller & Ruben Merz, Swisscom

At Swisscom, we are engaged in an ambitious technology and cultural transformation towards cloud-native readiness. We believe it is an essential component to keep on thriving in an increasingly competitive environment, and to further deliver reliable services, while accelerating delivery and improving efficiency. While the CNCF ecosystem is incredibly rich, its applicability to the development and operation of reliable telco service is in its infancy. Hence, in this talk, we want to share our observation from working for the past two years on the deployment of our 5G Core platform: in particular, while Kubernetes allows for full life-cycle automation of telco network functions, we see the need for four improvements areas: (1) independence between network functions and the underlying infrastructure; (2) increasing the maturity of configuration and state management of network functions; (3) some constraints of the 3GPP architecture; and (4) the need for service observability.