We’ve discussed how the telecom industry has evolved from running specialized network functions in specialized hardware to running them on VMs (VNFs) to Containers (CNF). evolve their networks from the initial physical bare-metal system to a virtual network function. As telcos and other CSPs begin moving to 5G RAN and 5G Core deployments, these are overwhelmingly based on Cloud-native microservice architectures, REST APIs, Kubernetes-based containers, and NoSQL databases for stateless architecture are commonly implemented in telecom networks. With this blog, we begin discussing life cycle management of 5G networks.
Telco Cloud Ops – Day 0
The above illustration describes the process of going from nothing to having cloud or on-prem instances running radio, edge, and core workloads. Also keep in mind that the above shows the provisioning of a single cluster but in production-grade deployments, one will deploy an orchestrator that provisions CNFs/VNFs from either a CI/CD process or GitOps pipeline or from a console.
- Infrastructure provisioning (compute, storage, and networking layers) is completely automated using a mix of Cloud Vendor (e.g. AWS CloudFormation) and Open Source tooling (e.g Terraform, Ansible). In the case of AWS, these tools initiate VPC creation, subnets creation, EFS volumes (for backing store) and then create EKS clusters.
- Then the concerned CNF/VNF applications can be deployed using either a Kubernetes operator, or Helm execution, which can be automated by Lambda, Step Function, and CodePipeline in the AWS service family. Vendors of CNFs then supply their docker images and Helm charts
- When an iterative change is made to the network application, it can be triggered via GItOps to go through a test and deployment cycle.
- Continuous changes and deployment – Both application and configuration changes to CNFs will trigger updates which happen like a sequence of steps These are automated using a Git-based trigger/ GitOps operator
The next blog post will expand on the last point and cover CI/CD pipelines that enable rapid deployment of Network Functions.