As global communications providers prepare to deliver high-speed connectivity to support new services and use cases, the need for low-latency, high-bandwidth, scalable networks is more important than ever. Conventional industry hardware won’t sustain next-generation mobile technology; the need for cloud native is essential for delivering the performance, capabilities, and automation 5G requires. Benefits include operational consistency, application resilience, simplified and responsive scaling at the microservice level, simplified integration with enterprise-facing cloud native applications, and improved portability between public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.
To address these needs, the OPNFV community began work in 2017 on a Virtual Central Office demo (VCO 1.0) to show demonstrate the interoperability of virtual components of a virtualized central office use case for NFV/SDN. This demo was shown as a keynote at the OPNFV Summit in Beijing, China, 2017. The demo has gone through several iterations, including VCO 2.0, shown as a keynote at ONS and OCP Summit in Amsterdam, a VCO 3.0 5G Cloud Native Network demo shown as a keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego, and finally a 5G Cloud Native Network with ONAP integration shown virtually as a keynote at ONES in 2020 (demo begins at 29:50). Over the last 4 years, over 100 volunteers across 5 open source communities, 20 partner companies, and 2 end users have collaborated to build this Proof of Concept.
Suggestions for 2021