KubeCon 2023: telcos increasingly turn to open-source solutions to unlock cloud-native network benefits

Analysys Mason attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, the flagship conference of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The event, held in Amsterdam between 18–21 April 2023, brought together the world’s leading open-source and cloud-native communities to collaborate on their cloud-native journeys. The co-located ‘Cloud Native Telco Day’ event featured speakers from Deutsche Telekom, DISH Network (DISH), NTT, Orange, Swisscom and Vodafone, who shared their progress on Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures for 5G and 6G deployments. Key themes included Project Sylva (Sylva), Nephio, observability, cloud-native automation and the need for more collaboration to ensure standardisation. Telecoms operators now recognise the importance of learning from the IT world in order to accelerate their ambitions and to avoid repeating past mistakes in the implementation of network function virtualisation (NFV) architecture.