Today, the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) published the “Cloud Native Manifesto: An Operator View”. This important publication provides key principles and requirements for Cloud Native Telecom from an operator’s point of view, and a clear view on the focus required by the industry in order to accelerate the adoption of cloud native solutions in mobile networks. “Cloud Native” refers to a way of designing and operating applications, network functions and services in an open and flexible environment with the intention to enable greater efficiency in operations and faster time to market for new services, thereby enabling operators to meet their customers’ needs.
“Given the strategic impact of the move towards cloud native, the already experienced and foreseen implications in its adoption for operators, and the multiple options and paths provided by industry players, it is the belief of the NGMN Board that a clear position on cloud native is required,” said Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “With this publication – written by the NGMN Board and invited operator experts – we provide that steering to the industry by outlining a clear set of prioritised calls to action, which, once addressed, will drive the migration at scale towards cloud native network workloads, for the benefit of the ecosystem and end-users”, he added.
“Whilst the industry is embracing cloud native as a paradigm to boost efficiency and enhance flexibility for current and future networks, it is clear that several issues remain, which will hamper the objective to achieve scale deployment – unless these are urgently, consistently and cohesively addressed through an industry wide effort” said Mauro Costa, NGMN Board Member and Director of Network Cloud and Continuous Delivery at Telia Company. “In particular, together with the entire industry, we need to ensure that solutions can be truly cloud native and multi-vendor and that we have the tools and processes in place to enable these” he added.
On the journey to highly flexible, sustainable, and resilient networks for the future, the NGMN Board believes in applying the following cloud native principles to all layers of network infrastructure, applications and services*:
- Decoupled infrastructure and application lifecycles over vertical monoliths
- API first’ over manual provisioning of network resources
- Declarative and intent-based automation over imperative workflows
- GitOps** principles over traditional network operations practices
- Unified Kubernetes (or the like) resource consumption patterns over domain-specific resource controllers
- Unified Kubernetes (or the like) closed-loop reconciliation patterns over vendor-specific element management practices
- Interoperability by well-defined certification processes over vendor-specific optimisation.
The full Cloud Native Manifesto can be downloaded from the NGMN website here:https://www.ngmn.org/wp-content/uploads/NGMN_Cloud_Native_Manifesto.pdf