A Reliability Assurance Framework for Cloud-Native Telco Workloads

Abstract

With the onset of 5G, Telecom service providers around the world are in the midst of a radical transformation of their networking infrastructure, moving away from vertically optimized proprietary hardware and software boxes, to Cloud Native (containerized) network functions (CNFs), communicating over standardized interfaces and running on Kubernetes clusters that operate on commodity off-the-shelf hardware. While CNFs, managed by container orchestrators provide greater agility, manageability, and significantly lower operational costs, the reliability and performance assurance have become much more complex with thousands of virtualized moving parts. Given the criticality of the workload, these large-scale containerized Telco systems require fast and completely automated reliability assurance pipelines where complex issues are detected, isolated, and remediated automatically. In this demo, we present a framework for a closed-loop assurance pipeline with CNF-level autoscaling as a use-case implemented on a real world 5G workload.