On 1/Aug/20 11:23, Etienne-Victor Depasquale wrote:
Over the past few weeks, I've attended webinars and watched videos organized by Intel. 
These activities have centred on 5G and examined applications (like "visual cloud" and "gaming"), 
as well as segment-oriented aspects (like edge networks, 5G RAN and 5G Core).

I am stunned (no hyperbole) by the emphasis on Kubernetes in particular,
and cloud-native computing in general. 
Equally stunning (for me), public telecommunications networks have been portrayed 
as having a history that moved from integrated software and hardware, 
to virtualization and now to cloud-native computing. 
See, for example Alex Quach, here @10:30). I reason that Intel's implication is that virtualization is becoming obsolete.

Would anyone care to let me know his thoughts on this prediction?

In the early dawn of SDN, where it was cool to have the RP's in Beirut and the line cards in Lagos, the industry quickly realized that was not entirely feasible.

If you are looking at over-the-top services, so-called cloud-native computing makes sense in order to deliver that value accordingly, and with agility. But as it pertains to actual network transport, I'm not yet sure the industry is at the stage where we are confident enough to decompose packet forwarding through a cloud.

Network operators are more likely to keep using kit that integrates forwarding hardware as well as a NOS, as no amount of cloud architecting is going to rival a 100Gbps purpose-built port, for example.

Suffice it to say, there was a time when folk were considering running their critical infrastructure (such as your route reflectors) in AWS or similar. I'm not quite sure public clouds are at that level of confidence yet. So if some kind of cloud-native infrastructure is to be considered for critical infrastructure, I highly suspect it will be in-house.

On the other hand, for any new budding entrepreneurs that want to get into the mobile game with as little cost as possible, there is a huge opportunity to do so by building all that infrastructure in an on-prem cloud-native architecture, and offer packet forwarding using general-purpose hardware provided they don't exceed their expectations. This way, they wouldn't have to deal with the high costs traditional vendors (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Siemens, ZTE, e.t.c.) impose. Granted, it would be small scale, but maybe that is the business model. And in an industry where capex is fast out-pacing revenue, it would be the mobile network equivalent of low-cost carrier airlines.

I very well could be talking out the side of my neck, but my prediction is mobile operators will be optimistic but cautious. I reckon a healthy mix between cloud-native and tried & tested practices.

Mark.