Sergio Tarazona
Gerente de Soluciones y Arquitectura en Whitestack
Whitestack has successfully deployed its Telco Cloud solution across more than a dozen data centers throughout Latin America. On this platform, customers have implemented both virtual machine-based network functions (VNFs) and containerized network functions (CNFs).
The following diagram illustrates the key distinctions between these two virtualization approaches
Kubernetes and CNFs: The new industry standard
Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. Its features enable the coordination of multiple containers across a distributed infrastructure through a robust and scalable platform.
Virtual Machines
Containers
- Each application needs to have its own operating system along with its libraries.
- Each virtual machine needs to load the entire operating system and its libraries in order to start. This makes the startup process slow.
- Containerized applications can reuse the host operating system’s kernel and share libraries among them.
- Containers share the operating system, libraries, and binaries (as appropriate).
The industry at large — including Telecommunications and IT — has shifted towards using microservices-based applications due to their many advantages over monolithic solutions. Therefore, the use of containers becomes crucial, especially in 5G SA (Standalone) solutions where containerization is mandatory, as it maximizes the benefits of containers: faster deployment, simplified operations, lighter and more portable applications, and signaling that now relies on APIs over HTTP.
Container Adoption in Network Functions
The industry has adopted Kubernetes as the de facto container orchestrator for its applications. Kubernetes offers multiple advantages:
Automated deployment and scaling: The use of tools like Helm or Kustomize enables the automated deployment of complex applications. These applications can also scale up or down based on traffic demand.
High availability and fault tolerance: Its stateless design detects failing resources and replaces them, can automatically restart services, and distributes the load across different nodes to ensure availability.
Efficient resource management: You can more precisely define the amount of resources an application will consume, allowing for more efficient resource allocation.
Seamless deployments and updates: Through rolling updates and rollbacks in case of failures.
Horizontal scalability: You can increase the application’s processing capacity by adding more replicas of resources.
Portability and multi-cloud compatibility: A Kubernetes application is agnostic to the underlying infrastructure, making it easy to move between private and public clouds.
Network function providers have recognized these benefits and are using Kubernetes for deploying their containerized applications, focusing more on service-level functionalities and letting the infrastructure handle efficient resource management, high availability, and scalability. The catalog of containerized network functions continues to grow every day.
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Transition to Containers for an Operator
The transition to containers is not just a decision an operator must make — it’s crucial to ensure that the infrastructure is ready and that the applications are containerized. For an operator, it’s key to choose an adequate Telco Cloud solution that enables the coexistence of virtual machines and containers, allowing for efficient resource use and a smooth transition to containers without impacting prior investments.
In this regard, Whitestack, through its Telco Cloud solution, enables this coexistence between virtual machines and containers. It also allows centralized management of multiple Kubernetes-based container clusters, making the transition into the containerized world even simpler.
Whitestack’s Experience with Containerized Network Functions
Whitestack’s Telco Cloud already has several containerized network functions, or CNFs, running in production — ranging from signaling-focused functions like PCRF (Policy and Charging Rules Function), to applications managing VoLTE voice calls like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), or managing mobile phone internet access like EPC (Evolved Packet Core) in 4G and 5G technologies.
Additionally, Whitestack is a member of several organizations that promote open-source and standardization, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Sylva Project. Whitestack also offers network function providers the opportunity to deploy their applications in its lab located in Santiago, Chile, where they can test in an environment very similar to production.
The main challenge in implementing these network functions has been the demanding latency and bandwidth requirements — much stricter than typical IT applications — which Whitestack has successfully addressed at the infrastructure level through advanced resource optimization techniques.
Finally, Whitestack’s experience in the Telco sector ensures that the adoption process of containerized network functions is straightforward for operators, many of whom still lack experience with these types of technologies.
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