• A team of more than 80 volunteers from 14 companies and organisations together with six open source communities and standards groups last yearunveiled a world-beating project
• It was a complex task that took four months of intense collaboration 
• This was the E2E 5G Cloud Native Network live demonstration which, as Hanen Garcia of Red Hat explains, was a great example of the power of Open Source partnership

Late last year at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, a team of more than 80 volunteers from 14 companies and organisations together with six open source communities and standards groups unveiled their E2E 5G Cloud Native Network live demonstration from the VCO 3.0 (virtual Central Office) working group. The demo took a cloud native approach to building a 5G network prototype on open source infrastructure, including kubernetes, and was hosted and ran from Sophia Antipolis in France and Montreal, in Quebec, Canada and from a private cloud and the public cloud. As Hanen Garcia of Red Hat explains, the demonstration was a great example of the power of partnership with Open Source communities, including companies, manufacturers, vendors and operators all working together in community to show a fully-functional, live proof of concept (PoC). It was a complex task that took four months of intense collaboration between groups and communities around the world and, Hanen Garcia says, the success of the exercise provided irrefutable evidence that the PoC was of great importance to the 5G industry in general and CSPs in particular because many operators had fed their requirements and expectations into the communities and other players who designed the PoC from the ground up. The prime goal of the exercise (apart from the live demonstration of course) was to provide a technical baseline for what an operational, commercial 5G network will look and be like. Today, micro-service architectures and containers technologies are being adopted across the entire global industry as operators and CSPs examine cloud native architectures and infrastructure to deploy 5G networks. Indeed, as Hanen Garcia says, 5G will be THE determining factor in the adoption of micro-services and containers technologies. Hanen Garcia explains that there were many reasons behind the decision to adopt a cloud native strategy for the 5G demo, including the innate flexibility to deploy workloads anywhere in the network regardless whether that be in the core, in the RAN or in central offices. Equally important is the ability to take advantage of the footprint of containers dynamically to scale-in and scale-out across the network. And then there is the life-cycle management that is a native component of kubernetes for stateless network functions and services. As Hanen Garcia explains, "Leveraging the infrastructure for both networks and applications will give CSPs the chance to increase the profitability of networks and infrastructure and 5G will help that as 5G deployments spread worldwide. He adds that Red Hat has focussed on building an ecosystem of collaborative partners and the wisdom of that approach was vindicated in the coming together of members who deigned, developed and produced the world's first 5G Cloud Native Network live demonstration.

Filmed at: TelecomTV Studios, London, December 2019

To view the VCO 3.0 Feature please click here: World's first prototype network E2E 5G Cloud Native with Open Source components demonstrated live