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Project Nephio is run by the Linux Foundation and backed by many operators and other companies, including Google, Orange, Telus and Verizon.
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Kandan Kathirvel and Gabriele Di Piazza at Google told Silverlinings the project will arrive “soon” but didn't provide additional detail on timing.
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The project will help address the problem of networks and applications behaving like "two ships in the night," according to Di Piazza.
Though it seems to have fallen slightly behind schedule , two Google executives told Silverlinings the first version of the cloud-native network automation initiative Project Nephio is set to arrive in the very near term and hinted a new commercial product from the company could follow on the heels of the release.
Started in April 2022, Project Nephio is run by the Linux Foundation and backed by 70-plus companies. The Linux Foundation had originally slated the release of the Kubernetes-based project for the second quarter of 2023. But we're now well into the third quarter. So, what's the deal?
Kandan Kathirvel, lead product manager of telco analytics and automation at Google, and Gabriele Di Piazza, Google's senior director of product management, telecom and edge, told Silverlinings it will arrive “soon” but didn't provide additional detail on timing.
Piazza said that “pockets of different activities” around the automation work will also lead to “a commercial Google product.”
“It’s... something we’ve been looking to do,” he said. “It is obviously a conversation we’ve been having with different carriers.”
The Nephio project is backed by many operators and other companies, including Orange, Telus and Verizon among others. Over 100 developers are focusing on developing carrier-grade, intent automation and common automation templates. The goal is to streamline the deployment and management of multi-cloud infrastructure and network functions across large-scale edge deployments.
Cloudy notions
While most folks might think of network automation as inherently related to mobile networks or 5G, Kathirvel said that's actually not the case. “This project has nothing to do with that specifically. It is generically looking at how to enable cloud native automation, whether a function is a mobile function or a fixed-line function,” he stated.
According to Piazza, Project Nephio will help address the problem of networks and applications behaving like "two ships in the night." That is, like two entities that don't see or communicate with each other. “Clearly there’s an application that doesn’t have enough continuous information about the network. And the network that is not providing information there,” he explained.
That's a problem, especially for operators looking to move to cloud-native infrastructure. "I don’t believe you can have a cloud-native network without having full communication and interdependency between infrastructure and applications," Piazza stated.
This spills into the capital and operating costs of future telecom networks, Kathirvel suggested.
Kathirvel noted telecom CTOs across the board are looking to reduce costs. Zero touch provisioning (ZTP) is one way to achieve that. ZTP can be used to automate the deployment of base stations and more in a truly cloud native network, which could drastically reduce the cost of rolling out radio access networks (RAN).
“Zero touch provisioning is not possible without having proper cloud-native automation in place...and this is needed to deploy things on a large scale...it could be 5G, it could be a wireline deployment, anything on a large scale,” Kathirvel concluded.
We'll just have to sit tight until the release arrives!