SAN DIEGO – Anyone attending this week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego would be forgiven for assuming that Kubernetes is the most stable, wonderful, and useful software platform to ever come down the pike. (Sorry Linux). But, there remains one significant market segment that could test the mettle and fortitude of the Kubernetes community: 5G.

Luckily, there are people and vendors in the Kubernetes space that are up for the task.

One of those is VMware, which sees significant opportunity in tackling the 5G space. Company CEO Pat Gelsinger earlier this year said that telco cloud and 5G represent a “great opportunity to participate in an enormous market.” At the time he said about 60 service providers use VMware technology to build their telco cloud.

During an interview at this week’s event, Craig McLuckie, VP of product and development at VMware, noted that the move toward 5G and the edge is going to push a large number of devices out into the market that in turn will need a stable and scalable orchestration and management plane. He explained that Kubernetes is facing that task.

“It’s a whole different ecosystem and it will be a fantastic and interesting challenge for the Kubernetes community and the community’s codebase in how they might solve this,” McLuckie said.

One of those challenges will be the ability for the Kubernetes community to avoid fragmentation that derailed OpenStack. That platform was an initial effort to help telecom operators integrate software into their operations, but was tripped up by a governance model that allowed vendors and operators to fork different solutions that often times did not feed back into the OpenStack core.

“So we saw pretty significant Balkanization,” McLuckie said of OpenStack. “We saw a lot of different players in the technology show up.”

That’s not to say that OpenStack failed. In fact, OpenStack is a powerful underlying piece for most telecom operators. A perfect example is the OpenStack Foundation’s Airship project that is led by AT&T and brings together OpenStack and Kubernetes to simplify network operations.

However, as the industry looks to further drive cloud-native efficiencies into their operations, Kubernetes appears to be a prime candidate to serve as that base for 5G. McLuckie said the key will be in keeping those efforts in line.

“As we look to the future, a lot of folks are looking to Kubernetes and asking the question of whether in that particular segment if it’s going to manifest in the same way that OpenStack manifested in that segment. Or whether it will hold together and achieve a level of coherence that will allow people to deliver functions on a common, consistent underlying infrastructure,” McLuckie said. “It’ll be a fascinating test. It’s something we can’t control. I certainly have aspirations, but it’s going to be up to us to execute.”

McLuckie came to VMware as part of that company’s $550 million acquisition of Heptio late last year. McLuckie co-founded Heptio with Joe Beda, and both were involved at Google on its Compute Engine and the platform that eventually became the Kubernetes project.

VMware quickly integrated Heptio’s operations into its Essential PKS platform. And has since further focused its Kubernetes efforts through its Tanzu platform.

McLuckie noted that Tanzu Mission Control, which is the first product to come out of its host platform, will be key to the company’s Kubernetes push into the telco market. Mission Control provides a single point of control from which customers will be able to manage all their Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they run.

“It’s really important to provide a way to centralize control using a framework that’s modular, API-driven that is present in a lot of the Kubernetes ideals,” McLuckie said of VMware’s Tanzu efforts.