Loodse demonstrated that building a cloud-native 5G network is possible on open architecture using its Kubermatic Kubernetes platform during a live demo at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event. For the demo, Loodse's Kubermatic platform served as a standardized base compute infrastructure across different cloud providers, delivering consistency from cloud to core to edge. And while the live demonstration was a success on stage, perhaps the real excitement was happening behind the scenes.

“We actually had to switch at the last minute from Alibaba Cloud to OVHcloud,” explained Bill Mulligan, Kubernetes advocate at Loodse, in an interview with SDxCentral. “And that’s the great thing about Kubermatic, we were able to essentially make that switch with a click.” 

Loodse — which is derived from a Dutch word for harbor pilot, or one who steers all ships safely into harbor — launched in 2016, and originally began as a cloud migration company helping organizations migrate from on premises into the cloud. 

Mulligan explained that Kubernetes was the hot new technology at the time and the role it played in driving the company's direction and services for its customers who, at the time, were looking for ways to manage Kubernetes clusters across different environments. 

Kubernetes is the helmsman steering containers, Mulligan noted, before asking rhetorically about what is steering clusters.

Loodse developed Kubermatic as an automated operations engine for Kubernetes clusters that provides fully managed master components and nodes along with horizontal scaling for nodes and workloads, Mulligan explained, “to serve as the captain’s captain steering all Kubernetes clusters.”  

If an organization is trying to manage multiple different clusters across different environments in a very distributed environment, and if the industry really believes that Kubernetes is the de facto container orchestration platform to manage distributed systems, then why not use Kubernetes to manage Kubernetes?

“That's essentially the model that we take,” Mulligan said. That model allows companies to run multiple clusters at scale, updating, deleting, and rescheduling clusters without impacting functionality.

Kubermatic leverages Kubernetes' reconciliation loops to automate the operations of the underlying community's infrastructure and allows developers to work in the cloud-native stack of their choice with a consistent experience across all environments. The platform is fully integrated with Red Hat OpenShift and provides native support for bare metal, VMware, and OpenStack environments for on-premises, as well as public cloud deployments, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Packet, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 

Considering how often 5G is in the news, there has been limited discussion regarding how telecommunication companies plan to replace their conventional networking hardware that is incapable of hosting the performance capabilities and automation demands to deliver 5G. It's not possible for the current model to economically operate on a larger scale, centralize and manage all edge locations, and provide a consistent experience in an automated fashion, Mulligan said. 

“5G has all these promises but only if you can go toward what the telcos call zero touch, essentially, the automation of the software operations there,” Mulligan said. 

Telecommunication providers are shifting their gaze toward cloud-native technologies, specifically Kubernetes, for the resilient, flexible, scalable, and automated capabilities inherent to their architecture. The container orchestration platform is being tasked with managing the container-based infrastructure that will be needed to support the promise of 5G networks, automating what previously would have been manual labor intensive operations. 

As Loodse demonstrated with Kubermatic, “containerization in 5G is not only possible, but it can be here today,” Mulligan said. “The industry is changing, and if telcos want to keep up they’d better start examining these technologies.”