Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation, during a keynote address at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event where she helped demonstrate a Kubernetes-powered end-to-end 5G cloud native network.

SAN DIEGO – The Linux Foundation’s LF Networking group conducted a live demo of a Kubernetes-powered end-to-end 5G cloud native network at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event that showed significant progress toward what future open source telecom deployments could look like. And it also showed that progress is going to need a lot of cooperation.

The complex demo included a trio of locations, racks of hardware, numerous open source software platforms, and a Faraday cage. Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation, was tasked with corralling the demo that did indeed show – if just briefly – a successful video call placed from the event stage in San Diego.

For the demo, LF Networking set up a prototype network to connect a live video call between points-of-presence (PoP) at the KubeCon event in San Diego, a Kaloom lab in Montreal, and at Eurecom in Sophia Antipolis, France. The call itself used a 5G network on stage that tapped into public and private clouds to connect a packet core network in Montreal, an IP-multimedia subsystem (IMS) core in the public cloud, and a 4G LTE lab in France.

The Faraday cage was used to restrict the reach of millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum in the on-stage 5G connection as the demo did not have the proper Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorization to use that spectrum in a commercial environment.

The demo included components and software from more than a dozen companies and organizations, including A10 Networks, Alibaba, Altran, China Mobile, Commscope, Foxconn, Intel, Kaloom, Lenovo, Loodse, NetScout, OpenAirInterface, Red Hat, and Turnium.

Kirksey explained that the demo was born out of LFN’s Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project that she has been part of since its beginning. That project allows for the testing, iteration, and a collaboration framework for common NFV infrastructure (NFVi). The OPNFV project also tapped into work from its Verification Program (OVP) that verifies the labs, infrastructure, and virtual network functions (VNFs).

Another acronym involved was the Linux Foundation’s ongoing work with mobile industry trade association GSMA under the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT). The group is working with service providers to define and create VNF reference architectures for NFVi. This will include a global reference model, architecture, and VNF certification lifecycle. CNTT focus areas include containerization, Kubernetes-based cloud native stacks, and container-based network functions’ validation-based requirements.

Kirksey said the demo was important due to the growing amount of work around networking issues and Kubernetes. The container orchestration platform is being tasked with managing the container-based infrastructure that will be needed to support the promise of 5G networks.

“We are embracing cloud native and new applications and we want to let the folks here know why we want to partner with the cloud native developer community,” Kirksey said. “It has been a bit of a challenge to get that community excited about telecom and to get excited about working with us to advance networking.”

That Kubernetes focus on 5G telecom was echoed at the event by Craig McLuckie, VP of product and development at VMware, during an interview with SDxCentral. McLuckie, who was formerly at Google where he worked on its Compute Engine and the platform that eventually became the Kubernetes project, said that 5G will “be a fantastic and interesting challenge for the Kubernetes community and the community’s codebase in how they might solve this.”

However, that work continues at a cautious pace. Amy Wheelus, VP of AT&T’s Network Cloud, earlier this year explained that while the carrier is moving for deeper Kubernetes integration, there are still some challenges tied to multi-tenancy, which is the ability to isolate tenants of a cluster, and throughput.

“Security and throughput capabilities for our runtime are not quite there yet as an industry,” she said in regards to the level of Kubernetes maturity.

AT&T is using Kubernetes as a core tenant of its ongoing move toward greater cloud control of its network assets. This is using the Airship project that is tying together OpenStack and Kubernetes to support network control. The carrier is using that platform to run its 5G network and FirstNet public safety networks as containerized network functions (CNFs) on its network.

Photo courtesy of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).