5G-Kube: Complex Telco Core Infrastructure Deployment Made Low-Cost

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) along with Software Defined Networking (SDN) have brought an evolution in telecommunications laying out the bases for 5G networks and its softwarization. Accordingly, new implementations of telecom standards, such as the 3GPP 5G Core, are defined as fully-virtualized infrastructures consisting of different components and leveraging a cloud-native approach. At the same time, standard-oriented solutions, such as ETSI Management and Orchestration (MANO), have emerged to master the complexity of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) orchestration, including 5G Core VNFs. While MANO operates at the NFV level, it also leverages existing cloud infrastructures for the deployment of VNFs by interoperating with resource orchestrators at the cloud level. From the business perspective, that requires telco operators to interact with different technology providers, from NFV/MANO software producers to cloud computing providers, and to hire technicians proficient in the technologies of both telco and computing worlds, that are a rather difficult human resourcing to find. The main claim of the article is that the Development and Operations (DevOps) tools in the IT world are mature enough to leverage them directly in the telco world, without superimposing other interlaced standard/software. That allows to significantly reduce OPEX cost of complex telco infrastructures by supporting all needed automation and by avoiding the combined use of (too) complex layered standards/software stacks, such as in the case of MANO. Accordingly, in this article, we leverage container-based technologies and Kubernetes to design and evaluate a novel deployment approach, called 5G-Kube, for softwarized 5G core networks. 5G-Kube, which is openly to the community, has been also evaluated in two different use cases of the 5G Core and Kubernetes deployment fitting, namely, Industry 4.0 and Smart Cities.