Applying Cloud native principles to all layers of network infrastructure, applications and services as put forth from the NGMN:
- 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.
Reference
- https://www.ngmn.org/wp-content/uploads/NGMN_Cloud_Native_Manifesto.pdf
- https://www.ngmn.org/highlight/ngmn-publishes-cloud-native-manifesto.html
" Practical challenges and pain points on this journey, which hinder progress towards the target expressed in the NGMN Cloud Native Manifesto, have been identified and are being felt."
"For the new model to work, vendors and CSPs must provide mutual SLAs: the CSP must guarantee a certain level of quality at the platform layer, while CNF vendors need to guarantee that the application will perform on the platform with SLAs that meet defined KPIs.Challenges in Cloud Native Telco Transformation Today (source: Accelerating Cloud Native in Telco whitepaper *)"
https://github.com/cncf/cnf-wg/blob/main/doc/whitepaper/Accelerating_Cloud_Native_in_Telco.md
Pre-Validation. Historically, Network Functions have been developed and pre-integrated with well-defined infrastructure, which was known in advance. That pre-validation was done by a Network Function vendor and the system was delivered as a validated/certified bundle together with performance and stability guarantees. In the cloud native world, there are too many permutations which makes it impractical to follow the traditional certification path. However, Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) vendors are still sticking to it by picking a small number of opinionated infrastructure flavors (different from vendor to vendor!) to pre-validate against, making any infrastructure outside this selection too complicated, too costly, and too slow to deliver for CSPs. This creates problems in the adoption of those CNFs as CSPs generally prefer to each have a unified cloud native infrastructure layer, which they are free to choose and often it can differ from the opinionated infrastructure already validated by the CNF vendors.
...