Cloud-native network automation and cloud infrastructure are seen as fundamental to a fully realized vision for 5G telecom networks. Nephio, the Linux Foundation open source project that originated at Google Cloud and launched in April 2022, is working to simplify that cloud-native automation and expects to debut its first frameworks release in the second quarter.
Today, over 70 companies participate in Nephio, including Google Cloud. The technical steering committee includes Bell Canada, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telus, TIM, Verizon and Vodafone, and Ericsson and Nokia. 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.
“This basically mimics the current automation that exists in the IT world or in the cloud-native application world,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, Google Cloud’s senior director of product management focusing on telecoms and the edge. “Today there are complex templates as part of configuration.”
The project uses the Kubernetes container orchestration system as the underlying technology to make telecom systems – both applications and infrastructure – easier to use.
In addition to limiting the steps required to deploy networks, the goal is to make services composable and reusable, and reduce the total cost of ownership of the networks, according to Di Piazza, who’s worked on Nephio since inception.
“5G or whatever is cloud-ready today is the right testbed or the right starting point because of this function being already built with cloud-native principles, but this can extend to any type of network [and] any type of configuration,” Di Piazza said.
Nephio’s post-launch progress
The idea for Nephio started several years ago when Vancouver-based telco Telus was deploying some of its network functions to Google Cloud, according to Sana Tariq, a principal technology architect at Telus and vice chair of Nephio’s technical steering committee.
“We realized that we are not getting to see the benefits of public cloud and all of its sophisticated environment services and APIs,” Tariq said. “The automation techniques that we're using are legacy; they are not functional on the sophisticated cloud. The way the capabilities are evolving, we are not able to exploit that.”
While Telus conceptually is using the public cloud today, it’s not using any of the cloud services, according to Tariq.
“Today, the way we deploy workloads to the cloud, they're acting more as static workloads,” she said. “We are not leveraging the ability to scale in and out and grow and expand, and shift our workloads here and there. We are kind of just sitting on a big space in the cloud.”
Instead of tackling the needed automation work alone, Google Cloud moved the project to the Linux Foundation and provided seed code.
The advantage of the project being open sourced is that the large number of industry contributors can simultaneously test Nephio during development, according to Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation.
“As soon as Release 1 comes out, you can expect a lot of people to even deploy it, test it, run it, because the whole three- to six-month cycle of interoperability between vendors is all gone,” he said “Nokia's code, Ericsson's code will work day one, because they are participating in Nephio.”
Telcos’ cloud-native transition and Kubernetes
In their move from the non-cloud-native world, telecoms have been transitioning from virtualized network functions to container network functions, from private clouds to public clouds, and from centralized networks to highly distributed networks.
What’s missing is a single automation control plane at each layer of the technology stack to provide interconnected automations.
“The current systems are siloed – they're automated, but they're still siloed,” Joshipura said.
Nephio makes Kubernetes the common automation control plane for infrastructure management and applications. The open-source Kubernetes, which also originated at Google Cloud, is a container orchestration system for automating the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.
While Google Cloud is the only one of the so-called “Big 3” cloud providers with a role in the project, all cloud providers are big participants in upstream Kubernetes. By default, Nephio is multi-cloud, which is critical to seamless configurations, because telecom networks globally use one or more clouds, according to Joshipura.
“There's probably six to 10 cloud service providers roughly around the world if you go beyond the ‘Big 3,’ and all of [the telcos] have applications that span not just the core and the edge, but they also span clouds – whether it's OSS/BSS functions or new cloud-native network functions or even infrastructure,” he said.
If the orchestration is built on Kubernetes, then it becomes the “common currency” for allowing those functions to move across clouds, Joshipura said.
While 5G workloads stand to benefit most from Nephio in the short-term due to the number of greenfield deployments for network functions, Tariq is looking beyond 5G. She’s working on a proposal to use Nephio for Telus’ RAN deployments.
“This is ahead of the community at the moment,” she said. “I have a very strong belief that the next two years will actually be instrumental in finding the direction for the project and actually helping us see where this can actually grow for telcos.”
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