A 5G business needs low-cost, fast-to-deploy and scalable digital infrastructure to operate competitively, but the technology needed to support this infrastructure is unfamiliar and immature. Cloud-native technologies can support communications service providers' (CSPs’) 5G business goals, but implementation will require the right transition strategy from current telecoms cloud infrastructure.

This report describes the reasons why CSPs worldwide should adopt cloud-native technologies within their systems. The report analyses the benefits that CSPs can achieve by creating and onboarding cloud-native services and products using the Kubernetes (K8s) ecosystem. It outlines the migration path from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which underpins CSPs’ internal clouds (including telco cloud) to a K8s-based container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform.

In this report, we answer the following questions.

• What are the drivers of CSPs’ adoption of K8s to support 5G?
• What approach should CSPs take to using a container-as-a-service (CaaS) alongside, or instead of, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)?
• What are the implications of K8s for application development and specifically for 5G cloud-native network function (CNF) deployment?
• What organisational and skillset changes will be required as a result of the transition to K8s?
• How does K8s affect CSPs’ application delivery and support relationships between CSPs and their vendors?

Cloud-native computing challenges and solutions

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