The telecoms sector is already moving to cloud-native infrastructure. Designed to accommodate explosive growth in IoT devices, it promises a giant leap forward for consumer and business customers – both in terms of the connection speeds they expect and the number of networked devices and applications they will bring online. To make things even more challenging, 5G also specifies higher performance requirements for the latency and throughput of the core network.

What this all means for providers is an exponential increase in the amount of network traffic, alongside a drop in the latency with which compute services must be delivered – which entails serving and caching more applications at the edge of the network. In short, 5G will give new meaning to the concept of delivering at scale.

451 research explains: The concurrent process of global aggregate scale and rollout timing of 5G make telecom operators the cloud-native ecosystem's most important revenue generators and discerning customers. The unique characteristics of telecom (such as stateful applications, IPV6 support, SLAs) will require a degree of specialization for suppliers, and the need for skills augmentation, developer enablement and knowledge transfer will open ample service revenue paths.

Download the full report

Why containers matter

To deliver against these requirements, the industry needs a cost-effective infrastructure platform that can deliver vast amounts of compute resources at the edge. But that’s not all. 

With all this increased scale comes an increase in the complexity of the network itself. We have already seen a shift from networking hardware to Network Function Virtualization (NFV), resulting in software defined networks that can be reconfigured more easily. Now the industry is moving beyond virtualization and its associated costs, to Network Function Containerization (NFC). That involves running the network control plane in containers – and for today’s telco industry, containers means Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is perfect for 5G

Kubernetes is the natural solution for handling the containerization of core network functions, as well as for shifting thousands of applications and services to the edge. Now proven in enterprise environments across the globe, Kubernetes is today’s standard container platform. It is perfect for the kind of stateless management workloads 5G requires. And because it automates so much of the operational plumbing, it can cut costs and complexity too.

“Our application teams have more or less all the basics in their hands to start deploying and running their application in our very specific environment. We are running everything on-prem. We run the workloads also traditionally in many locations. We have a handful of what we call core locations, 20 to 25, then there are near edge locations and there are more than 10,000 edge locations.” Vuk Gojnic, Deutsche Telekom

Listen to the full podcast episode “Kubernetes at Deutsche Telekom - GitOps at the Edge”

“Traditionally, virtualizing multiple Kubernetes clusters has relied on heavyweight and expensive virtualization approaches. Instead, Weaveworks has demonstrated an approach based on KVM and Firecracker (known as microVMs), which provide lightweight virtualization capabilities and significant benefits for running multiple virtualized Kubernetes clusters in many environments, including edge.” Richard Case, Tech Lead on Bare Metal Kubernetes, Weaveworks

Read how Weaveworks, in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and AWS, significantly improves the efficiency of deploying Kubernetes across bare-metal pools. Liquid Metal: Multi-Cluster Kubernetes on Bare Metal with microVMs

Deutsche Telekom’s Till Stenzel recently talked to Weaveworks founder Alexis Richardson about GitOps - and why it’s such a good solution for telcos grappling with 5G. 

“We see the GitOps model really as a key framework to achieve that level of automation and consistency across all of the workloads and platforms that telcos have to operate.” – Till Stenzel, Managing Director Advisory, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners

The software is just the start

Recalibrating around the requirements of 5G means looking at process as well as infrastructure. It means finding a way to reduce the labour overhead involved in running tens of thousands of clusters at distributed locations. Processes and policies must be standardized to ensure security, compliance and access for the right teams – not to mention compatibility with legacy environments still running elsewhere in the business. Crucially, you need to introduce the new infrastructure and processes seamlessly. Which means no learning curves. No expensive training. No disruptive trial and error. The answer is to combine the proven container infrastructure of Kubernetes with a development toolset that your app teams already use: Git.