At this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Europe, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) came out with another interesting announcement: they are launching a new program to help telcos and other communication service providers adopt Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies and best practices. We think this is a great idea.
As we highlighted in our recent whitepaper on Why Organizations are Modernizing their Applications with Distributed, Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Deployments, there is a strong correlation between container and Kubernetes adoption and edge deployment.
“The lightweight portability of containers makes them ideally suited to distribution, while their abstraction facilitates deployment to non-homogenous federated compute platforms. Moreover, Kubernetes adds the orchestration needed to best coordinate this sort of distributed multi-region, multi-cluster topology.
In other words, organizations that have already adopted Kubernetes are primed to rapidly adopt modern edge deployments for their application workloads. Even those that are still at the single-cluster stage are in position to rapidly leap-frog to the distributed edge. Recent research by SlashData on behalf of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation confirms this correlation between edge, containers, and Kubernetes, noting developers working on edge computing having the highest usage of both containers (76%) and Kubernetes (63%) of surveyed segments.”
Seen from this perspective, anything that better aligns telco networks with Kubernetes plays into this larger trend to accelerate distributed cluster deployments.
The new program from CNCF is targeted at network equipment providers, offering a new certification (the Cloud Native Network Function, or CNF) so these vendors can verify that their equipment follows cloud native best practices, and thus making it easier for provider networks to choose network equipment technologies which support provider networks’ move to Kubernetes and other cloud native tools.
“Moving to cloud native infrastructures has long been difficult for telecom providers who have transitioned to VNFs and found themselves with siloed resources and specialized solutions not built for the cloud. The CNF Certification program is designed to fill this gap by creating solutions optimized for cloud native environments. Some of the world’s largest telecom organizations, including Huawei, Nokia, T-Mobile and Vodafone, already use Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies, and this program will make it easier for others to do the same.” Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director, CNCF
Of course, Section has already built a federated worldwide Composable Edge Cloud that allows any organization to rapidly deploy containerized application workloads across a multi-cloud edge network of Kubernetes clusters. Our provider partners – Lumen, Equinix, Digital Ocean, RackCorp, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – all run networks and equipment that Section’s platform orchestrates to make it easy and cost effective to deploy distributed containerized workloads today. By extending the same workload portability to telecom provider networks, platform providers like Section will enable DevOps teams to expand and deepen workload placement beyond cloud to more localized infrastructure. This will open up even more opportunities for developers to create more powerful application experiences.
Bravo, CNCF!
