 Well hello and welcome to another OpenShift Commons briefing and today we have my friend and colleague Paul Lanscaster from the Part of Development Group over at Red Hat and the Cloud Platform BU. And we're going to talk about something that I bet people have heard a lot about but don't know really the origins of and what the details are behind it. Cloud native network functions or CNFs which get misspoken as container native functions or cloud native functions but today you know Diane will try not to illiterate the acronym and let Paul introduce himself and tell us about how all of these things came to be and hopefully give us some insights in how you too can build some cloud native network functions and work with us here at Red Hat. So Paul take it away thank you very much for coming today. No problem thanks Diane. So yeah so I'm going to talk a little bit today about cloud native network functions running on OpenShift but more generally running on Kubernetes you know we at Red Hat have had a lot of experience with this stuff and you know hopefully the presentation will make things a little bit more clear about how we how we look at these particular workloads running on top of OpenShift and what we have done both in the open and with our customer base to sort of make OpenShift and therefore Kubernetes more real and more powerful to run your applications your network applications on. Okay so so I guess let's start first of all with defining what exactly a cloud native network function is. So so a little bit of credit to Legato here I pulled this from their their site if you go to ligato.io you'll see an explanation of what this is but at a high level right a cloud native network function is simply an application but it's a specific application a network network function that is designed and implemented to run inside of containers right. So cloud native network functions inherit all of the cloud native architectural and operational principles including the Kubernetes lifecycle management and agility and resilience and observability and and they are I mean they're built to deploy and run on top of Kubernetes right. So it's a very distinct type of application and there are some things that around tuning and specifics and building it and best practices that we can talk a little bit about as we go on and maybe I can give you some examples of but think about this is an application there are some specifics around the application but it is a type of application that is built on Kubernetes it uses Kubernetes principles there are some specific tunings that you'll want to have and in fact we've built into OpenShift for you so at a high level that's what a CNF is okay. So in terms of the journey that the community and the partners and the service providers themselves are on it is not an uncommon journey from other cloud-based applications right. So very similar to other applications in the cloud it started as what you would call bespoke hardware that's very verticalized especially in this industry to more monolithic applications that ran as virtual machines eventually those things got sort of broken out and ran on more horizontal platforms such as OpenStack where by the way we've had a lot of experience with that as well and then you know ultimately are making their way or have made their way and still are making their way towards being cloud-nated okay so that's the network functions or NFV journey that a lot of these folks are on hopefully a lot of you folks that are on the call today are well acquainted with this and what's driving it I mean what's driving it more than anything right so and there are a couple things I mean obviously the idea of the next generation networks around the world are really driving this right so both the CSPs and as well as the the media players all want to get to the same place which is to be able to run applications just like you would in any other cloud okay to be able to install those applications to manage the life cycles around those applications I mean really to just make it easier to operate and deliver new services the same model that really any other companies journey to the cloud is undertaking again there are some specifics around the way that the needs of these applications but this is what's driving it right so 5G it's a big buzz word that I think probably everybody on this session has heard about but these are the things that are the transformation to 5G the transformation to what we call digital service providers is driving a lot of this in the ecosystem okay so why cloud native then why why do we want to get to this part of the journey well it's about all the things I just mentioned in the previous slide it's about making it easier for you to operate easier for you to upgrade easier for you to manage you know easier to roll out new services is the entirety of the story of Kubernetes is and in cloud native applications in general applies to this we we as a company have been engaged in this for quite some time I'm sure that all of you are aware that you know we are you know one of the biggest contributors to Kubernetes and we're big believers in this whole thing but in the whole world of telecommunications in 5G it's the same sort of principles apply rates ease of delivery ease of rolling out new services ease of upgrading those services all of those principles are are why folks want to have cloud native network functions and and run those on their new 5G networks so to that end Red Hat has been very active in a lot of upstream communities not just the Kubernetes or the CNCF communities but many different communities including Linux Foundation networking you know I mean the list is is very long the open air interface the ORAN community and we see lots of our customers participating in these communities and this is a just a for instance of a customer very large customer China China mobile who who has been investing in in helping build what is ultimately going to land you know ultimately for a lot of different service providers out there ways to deliver these applications you know using open source technologies right so you can read more about this the the actual use case itself I mean you just simply google 5G in China mobile there's a lot of data there but in particular within the LFN community Linux Foundation networking community you can see a lot of the work that China mobile has done and this is across various parts of their network including radio and AI and their entire ecosystem this is one of the partners that we partners customers players in the service provider community that we see oftentimes and so we have you know we've worked with them and ultimately what we've done as far as putting together this this model for 5G cloud native you know service providers like China mobile will be adopting and have adopted so maybe I could talk a little bit about some of the architecture and this is not an uncommon architecture that you would find due to many services that are being built out in a global way but this is very specific to to network functions and some core functions and some edge functions that you you might want to sort of build out your architecture to look like this right so you know we work with many tier one service providers around the world and this is kind of an example of an architecture you might see out there so where there are there are core packet processing functions there's an SDN if not multiple SDN layers and then there are edge sites out there with applications that are closer to radio towers so making it multiple levels you've got the radio towers the farthest edge you've got a centralized office edge and then you've got your data center edge and all of those areas are sort of being thought of five if you will and then becoming cloud native as far as this particular architecture is concerned so this is kind of an example of what we did and or what we are doing in the community okay so talk a little bit about the POC that we did so a couple of years back now we started working on something called VCO which is for virtual central office this programmatically has gone through well not programmatically but technically has gone through a couple of different iterations we of course had a virtual machine based one but now as of even a couple of years ago had moved on to something that was cloud native and for those of you who may have attended QubeCon in the last in person QubeCon which I think was in San Diego a few years back but I'm sure folks will correct me if I'm wrong you may have seen a demo that we did which I'm going to talk about a little bit today that has actually been updated since then but as far as I know it was the very first ever live demo of an end-to-end cloud native 5g network where several folks internally that I work with folks like Hanan Garcia and Azar Syed put together an ecosystem of players that I'm about to talk about here in different locations where we showed an end-to-end video call that was completely based on OpenShift all of it was done in the open and these were the locations that we that we actually use right so we had a location for radio that was in Europe we had a location for the control plane and core which was in Montreal and then we also had another location for radio and core which was based in San Diego and this made up our global network for delivering this POC this was the architecture for the POC right so all of the functions themselves broken out for for as well as radio you can see how that sort of looked here and who some of the players were our partners like Calum and Lenovo in Montreal as well in San Diego and then what the technologies they use were based on so it was you know obviously Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Core OS as well as as well as OpenShift and this is the design for the radio pieces of it so you know we we were unable to obviously get any spectrum for this demo so we did this all in a fair day cage but nevertheless conceptually it's exactly the same as what you might find as an implementation or at least it gives you an a vision as to what you might find as far as implementation is concerned and this is these are the partners who we better build it out with right so again Lenovo A10 Ultron provided us with the 5G Core comm scope for the remote radio units and then we had a set of end user handsets which you can see over there on the left 5G phones this was the core design in Montreal again partners like Turnium A10 Ultron, Calum and Lenovo were involved and you can see how we stitched this together again it was operating across Europe Montreal and San Diego this is the European edge point again you can see the open area interface folks so open area interface is another upstream project that we're working on they aim to sort of make standard interfaces for radio available across open source and hopefully that's going to gain adoption this is the software stack that we use right so it was all running on bare metal well not all of it some of it was running in a public file but for a lot of the CNFs it was running on bare metal with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS OpenShift container platform running on top of that a lot of the cloud native applications and projects were leveraging all the ones that you can see there on the left and then for the public cloud pieces you can see some of the functions were actually run there and then of course the list of partners that we had folks like A10 Ultron the ones that I mentioned before ultimately making this happen let's see so what did we learn from this well we learned first of all that it's possible to deliver cloud native network functions and build real services using the stuff from this POC why do we look at it running on top of OpenShift of course you know Red Hat believes that we have the most enterprise ready Kubernetes distro out there and we look to the community to help us make make it better frankly so this is the work that we've been involved in in terms of you know the ecosystem the CNCF the LFN and making all of this work available ultimately to our service provider customers who run who want to run their cloud native functions on top of OpenShift this with a bare metal deployment look like don't have to get into too much of the detail here but you can see how we set up real time and had FPGA cards so these are some of the things that I talked about earlier that are little tweaks that are expected from folks in the service provider industry Red Hat includes operators that take care of these tunings for you things like the performance add-on operator or the SRIOV networking operator are in Red Hat's distribution of OpenShift Red Hat's product OpenShift rather and you know when you turn these things on and run them that that is a best practice way for you to run your containerized network cloud native network functions so I've got a little bit of a demo here I can go through Diane I'm not exactly sure how much time we have but we've got plenty of time and I would love to see this so let's run it and Chris if you're listening to let us know if is there a sound to this or is are you going to talk us through it I think there is sound to this but let me take take it let it rip yeah I know these things these demos are hard to put together live so I'm totally okay with a video yeah so let me let me just see here I need to assemble all the pieces in parts yeah so obviously this is us in our team logging into and building this entire demo using OpenShift I guess the sound isn't coming through for some reason so maybe I could talk a little bit to it but what you're seeing is really the back end of how we built this entire network again it's a it's a little bit of an older version of OpenShift and a lot of the innovation we've done since then helps our operators in the community take advantage of things like I mentioned the SRI the operator the performance out on operator but this demo sort of essentially shows how we built that now I think Diane maybe it's not as quite as good because the the sound isn't coming through for some reason so yeah the sound's not coming through but the visuals are fine the what you're seeing here is is essentially the pieces that we built it with including all the functions running on OpenShift we you know have brought those together here so I I think maybe this is a little too gosh I think we should probably skip on this because the sound isn't in the background and it's not yeah we can we can yeah if you do you have a link to the video I do have a link to the video I can send it out later if you just put it in the chat Chris Short can run the video and play it pull it we can pull it down but um don't worry about it just go on to where you're at in the slides and we'll okay you if you give me the video and anyone who's listening I will throw the video into the edited version of this so that you can hear the play-by-play I will do that yeah I'll send that send it on sorry apologies about that I'm not exactly sure I wasn't working but you know ultimately it talks about things about how we set it up of course this is a lot of detail on it another community that we've been working on is the multis community so this is all about the plug-ins or where the meta plug-in to CNI for instance this is another thing that we can set up very easily using operators and open ship so these are all the partners that we had involved as as I mentioned at the sort of the top of this it was folks like A10 and Ultron the list goes on here but the projects were in the LFN community and the opnfd community okay so um that at a high level is the entirety of the presentation and if folks have some questions I'm happy to do my best to answer those now what's interesting to me if you put that slide back up on the screen um when 2019 we had China mobile come um and give a presentation basically on these topics the early edition of it um in Barcelona in Spain and then I couldn't find it but I will find that the talk you were talking about at the San Diego uh KubeCon um in 2020 the evolution of this um this whole thing into something that's actually uh programmed now uh for certifying container native network functions you know it's been yeah we've been watching this transition and for almost I've been watching I'm sure you've been watching it much longer because you've been in the telco space waiting for this all to evolve but for me it sort of hit um in 2019 when um the gentleman from China mobile came and stood up on stage and he was saying waving his hands and he had the most deep dive um thing you know you're sort of mind blowing the the schematics that he was doing yeah and what you're showing now um is so much more I mean it's it's comprehensible that you know that the dyers and and I think that's what these container native network functions have done is they've taken the complexity out of deploying this um and cleaned it up so it's reproducible and automatable in a way that even in 2019 was um you know somebody's dream well I mean I think that is the case right so a lot of the work that we're finding in the ecosystem now in terms of the partners I mean they're definitely doing a lot of work to make their applications much more easily deployable on OpenShift and a lot of that has to do with uh their uh the belief in things like Kubernetes operators the operator framework and building operators to do things like not only the day one sort of install and upgrade stuff but ultimately how the operation lies their application so the day two things um and all of the additional functionality you can build using an operator so so there's that and not only that but what we've built into our platform from an operator perspective so a lot of the learnings that we've taken from having customers that are tier one service providers around the world we've actually put those tunings into our product using operator concepts right using literal operators like I keep mentioning the performance out on operator and the SRIOV operator to make it that much easier for anyone who's interested to deploy build deliver their cloud native functions on top of OpenShift. I do have uh an additional deck which talks about our certification and why we think uh you know CNF certification is important at Red Hat I can talk about it at a high level uh as well but we do have a program right and the program sort of looks at a couple of different areas um one area is of course how you've actually built your containers the other area is how you've built your automation right so a lot of folks were choosing Helm but Red Hat are big believers in Kubernetes operators obviously and the third area is how we actually test an ecosystem of different types of applications and how they should best perform on top of OpenShift and and we've donated some of the that testing and those concepts back to the community through various Githubs and I can you know share those with folks um after the call or after today's talk but we're welcoming folks in to sort of add their test cases and talk to us about those or you know even engage with us to talk to us what's most important to them so we can even make these programs more meaningful ultimately to the customers. So I think and that's the other thing that's that's um I'm hoping to do um with you over time um is to get some of these folks who have built um certified cloud native network functions I'm gonna do the cnf full on now that I'm gonna memorize it today what it all stands for but um is to get some of them on to talk about the use cases and why they built it and how they built it because I think that's also an interesting aspect and the more of these that we get I think somebody told me the other day we had around 40 to 45 of them in in the you know already certified uh out there but I'm sure there are lots more um use cases and different things that we can um do and so the more people talk about you know what it took to build them to containerize these things and um and get them tested I think that'll be um an interesting thing for the community to to learn about and also you know how some of these things are being used in in practice too that's I think some really I mean mostly what I've seen is um aside from your short demo and today is really the China mobile story um and it'd be really interesting to see some of the you know some of the other stories as well so yeah um we we certainly hope to be able to bring some of the partners or a lot of the partners that we've worked with to to open ship commons and have them talk about the work that they've done there's some very specific work depending upon the use case that probably is is very interesting to to the attendees um obviously if you know you're a radio application it's a lot different than if you're a say a core application and we can talk maybe to some of those those those partners I mean the the partners that we're working with on the radio side or partners like um Altio, Star, Parallel, Wireless, Ericsson and the list kind of goes on and then on the core side it's very similar you're affirming networks of the world, the maveniers of the world, CASA systems, Ericsson, etc so um yeah we I hope to be able to bring those folks to to this discussion in the future and they can talk a little bit about what they've done and how they've done it using the future. So where can they go um and maybe this is a share your screen again on the Red Hat site world to find out more about the certified program that's I think the key thing that so if you're not in the certified program yet or if you're just getting started um there's kind of a sort of a getting started page I think I stumbled on it the other day when I was trying to figure out what all this was about. Yeah so um so maybe I'll uh let's show that real quickly uh-huh let me uh just uh re-share my screen for just a moment let me know if you folks can see this yep okay so that's the upcoming event well this uh so this should be I should be showing access.redhat.com right now it is indeed yes okay so the first the very first step for anyone who's interested in partnering with Red Hat and helping having us help them build their native network functions to best practices on OpenShift is for them to join the technology partner program right so you can go to access.redhat.com slash join there is there's uh there should be uh two options there one option is the technology partner program and once you join the technology partner program that will allow you access to all of our products and services including OpenShift right um it will allow you to do things like uh you know grab subscriptions etc but that is is where you want to start now there is a um there is a workflow which I can share with everyone on how to go through this journey it's a get book and maybe I'll actually let me just share it with folks now in the chat window just a second here is the guide for how partners can start the certification process with us all right now I'm going to put that in the chat window for for folks to take a look at all right there there is one question but it might be slightly off topic um and it's coming in from um one up like either YouTube land or somewhere what are the benefits of OpenShift serverless and OpenShift service mesh um I think that's a bit off topic for today but I don't know from my perspective I think that's not something in this belly wick yeah I mean I think serverless and and service mesh are a couple of you know obviously very important pieces in the CNCF world and it's also things that we ship with with OpenShift I'm not the expert on serverless or service mesh um but I would say that you know we can probably um guide you in the right way there and there's obviously some PMs that we work with yeah there's a ton of there's a ton of other OpenShift Commons briefings on both of those topics that we can we can shoot you through and um and get you too but I think that's a little um out of scope for today's conversation um just to let Eshia Kesh know that Chris that would be okay and we definitely will cover that in multiple times and we'll cover it in future talks as well so I think that the the interesting thing for me is and I'm going to go back to this evolution from 2019 to you know here we are in 2021 and it's you know highly operator focused and there's certification programs in there what do you see is the next big thing um in this road roadmap um what's beyond um you know getting your your function well certified uh I would say yeah I mean the so we uh we've partnered with folks that can tell uh to put together posted labs where you can come and understand uh best practices with us um you know uh you as a partner uh you may want to do that because of course we can provide a lot of coaching on that um but in terms of the next big thing I mean I think it's it's happening now right it's it's what's going on in the world around 5G and a lot of this is pushing the next level of of how these these applications are being delivered right and and so the service providers you know tier one service provider even tier two service providers are all sort of pointing through this transition um and that you know ultimately is driving the next the next level I mean hopefully the next level will be continued to be open there are projects that are even looking at how to open more of the radio bits uh or radio applications projects like the ORAN and the open area interface that I mentioned earlier so I think the adoption of those things and you know the increased adoption of of just open ways to deliver these applications I think is is frankly the future of telecommunications networks in 5G and DI yeah it's pretty amazing to me how much of this is being done in the open too because telcos you know prior to the sort of I don't know yeah I don't like even 10 years ago or five years ago you weren't seeing telcos playing well together in at least I wasn't in open source spaces they may have had proprietary foundations and things and done stuff yeah together in you know and in industry backed initiatives but they weren't really huge open source players and and now you're seeing them you know all you know coming together whether it's in the linux foundation or in you know the cloud native foundation and that is really huge eye opener for me and I think that's also helping a lot drive these things to be much faster in the evolution um so it's I mean you nailed it there Diane I mean a lot of the vendors excuse me a lot of the vendors who are or have been supplying the telecommunications service providers for many years are now starting to realize that this is the trend and so all of these vendors are are now starting to collaborate in the open and I think that is you know that's the sea change that everybody wants right it's the sea change that the customer wants and it's also the it's the evolution of how we all work together and so we're starting to find the various players you know working in things like oran open our interface LFN I mean the list of projects just kubernetes multis um the list excuse me it goes on and on there and I mean I think this is the future of what's going to be happening yeah it's happening now but it's going to continue because it you know there's a huge initiative inside of red hat around telcos is you know a coalescing of different technologies um I mean you're focused on one area but there's you know there's another team I've been working with Bill Wright and Lisa Kaywood around this enterprise neuro systems initiative around leveraging what a few what's the Mexican telco's name I can't think yeah thank you thank you I have been doing and they're open sourcing all their ai ops for you know automating and and the the back end side of the telco operations and you know you know 10 years ago five years ago you weren't you wouldn't see this and this is just um I think and and we see it in every industry so it's it's not new but the embracing of you know the open source development model and the understanding that doing it and innovating together benefits everybody and also I think it makes it easier for um end users and customers to adopt and trust um the services so they're not dealing with one big locked in proprietary um entity so I think it's a it gives a better level of trust that you know maybe they can move um and play in different spaces and aren't as locked in but yeah benefits okay look the the uh you know the mobile network service providers are they're in partnership with this next generation of applications which are going to be able to or are taking advantage of things like you know the edge or the provider edge or whatever you want to call it the telco edge and there are all kinds of applications that are going to be running out there that are going to require for or are best going to become meaningful when they're using things like AI whether that's for industrial use cases and manufacturing whether it's for the you know energy world it I mean in general these things are referred to sort of at a high level as private by gene where the network is extended not necessarily using a public spectrum but a private network um all the way out to like retail facilities uh you know the energy world and mining um and and the service providers are a part of this and this and the applications that live on the network are all a part of this so again a lot of those use cases ultimately are driving changes as well in addition to the fact that everybody on their hands that wants to have the best possible experience there's these other use cases that are sort of adding on top of that to drive what's the change in in telecommunications so it's going to be an interesting ride this next couple of years I think watching watching this space and seeing what comes out of the telcos space as they learn more and more about you know the power of collaborating here and I think the stuff that your team has been doing um you were working with a couple of architects um you know just in the work that you've been doing but Gil who's also on our team is doing a lot of stuff with Verizon and you know there's you know Mark's doing a lot of partners so that's really interesting to watch um how the partner ecosystem is evolving and um the best practices and getting the labs set up and getting all this stuff available and the role of Red Hat as the vendor or and partner for all of these folks who are collaborating helping them you know do the testing you know get the best practices in place make sure it's all secure we really um it's it's been really very interesting to see the speed at which this change is happening and I'm really pleased that you came and explained what all of this was and what we were doing that was pretty cool today to get that story in the walk around it's interesting that you mentioned best practices I'm going to put another link into the chat for folks but this is a document that we spent a lot of time on with um with Verizon in particular and it's a roadmap it's a very in depth and detailed roadmap on how to best build your subnative functions for OpenShift it's 60 plus pages of very deep technical and engineering information uh on how you can do that and so you know it's a PDF I would encourage you guys to go grab it take a look at it and you know ask us if you have any questions but this is really uh the culmination of work that we've done with again two or one operators like Verizon I will definitely add that in um it's yeah it's it's the version 1.21 from October that's yeah I saw that come by and I have to say I ignored it because it was huge and too deep it was one of the mind-blowing things like I'm never going to get the hardware to play with any of this and I think that's the beauty beauty of having having you on to be able to explain this because it's like most of us we hear about this stuff but we don't have you know this you know this is this is a big buck lab set up so I know this is not your home lab thing that you're going to do with okd or something yeah this is not poc stuff this is definitely this is commitment yeah no I've heard you guys bandy about some price tags for these labs and I'm like okay I have a little open source okd home lab budget here but um it really I'm I'm grateful that you came and you spent the time today and um and you you shared the stories with us I'm really looking forward to you kicking off a series with some of the partners to to tell us about their journeys and what they're doing on the edge and in telco and and how this is working and what I really think is that some of the we should get um the open air folks and um the other folks they'll open them to come in to tell you know give sort of an update on where they're at with their projects and where they're going um you know what the roadmap is and where you know how to contribute in the upstream too so I think there's there's a lot of content here that we can tease out um and in the coming months to really um showcase some of this because you know we've come a long way since the Barcelona Spain China Mobile talk um that that I gave that kind of was like whoa this is really complicated I'm not sure I'm going to get you know and the and you could see sometimes you know the the diagrams were like packed in every inch of his slide and he was he did a wonderful job of it um and especially in the time allotted but you could see where the complexity has really um the operator ecosystem has really helped simplify a lot things and so that's I think the other piece of the puzzle is the other technologies kubernetes and maybe service mesh and service less and all of these other things start to come into play simplifying the complexity of where we are even just in 2019 over the coming months will be really um what I'm looking for to see hearing more about and where where people can contribute in the upstream and if you're definitely if anyone's watching this and listening and you're interested in you know getting on board in the labs or getting your you know learning more about the best practices or getting certified for open shift all is the person to reach out to um yeah maybe I should I put my email address for folks to yeah sure you're sure your thank you slide there with that or your email address or anything all right and I will throw that um yeah plancast without the er on the end of it at red hat dot com um and we will um leave it at that for today and thank you and definitely have you back because um it isn't it's still pretty complex there there are some pieces of that um that yeah like the multis piece you know you had one slide and I'm like that's a day that's a day of talks I've sat in multis talks that's yeah there's plenty of information that's correct and there's plenty more so if you're interested in this topic let us know if there's an aspect of this topic that you want to hear more about um reach out to me or to paul and um we will definitely try and schedule a briefing on it um and at the very least find the resource to help you get your questions answered so paul um thanks for today uh lovely view out your window back here um I'm liking that the empires day Billy I know you I know you're not really there but um I wish we could be so hopefully soon we'll be doing this in person so take care all and um we'll talk to y'all soon thank you dian