NGMN publishes Cloud Native Manifesto

“Given the strategic impact of the move towards cloud native, the already experienced and foreseen implications in its adoption for operators, and the multiple options and paths provided by industry players, it is the belief of the NGMN Board that a clear position on cloud native is required,” said Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “With this publication – written by the NGMN Board and invited operator experts – we provide that steering to the industry by outlining a clear set of prioritised calls to action, which, once addressed, will drive the migration at scale towards cloud native network workloads, for the benefit of the ecosystem and end-users”, he added.

“Whilst the industry is embracing cloud native as a paradigm to boost efficiency and enhance flexibility for current and future networks, it is clear that several issues remain, which will hamper the objective to achieve scale deployment – unless these are urgently, consistently and cohesively addressed through an industry wide effort” said Mauro Costa, NGMN Board Member and Director of Network Cloud and Continuous Delivery at Telia Company. “In particular, together with the entire industry, we need to ensure that solutions can be truly cloud native and multi-vendor and that we have the tools and processes in place to enable these” he added.

On the journey to highly flexible, sustainable, and resilient networks for the future, the NGMN Board believes in applying the following cloud native principles to all layers of network infrastructure, applications and services*:

1. Decoupled infrastructure and application lifecycles over vertical monoliths
2. ‘API first’ over manual provisioning of network resources
3. Declarative and intent-based automation over imperative workflows
4. GitOps** principles over traditional network operations practices
5. Unified Kubernetes (or the like) resource consumption patterns over domain-specific resource controllers
6. Unified Kubernetes (or the like) closed-loop reconciliation patterns over vendor-specific element management practices
7. Interoperability by well-defined certification processes over vendor-specific optimisation.

The full Cloud Native Manifesto can be downloaded from the NGMN website here: https://www.ngmn.org/wp-content/uploads/NGMN_Cloud_Native_Manifesto.pdf

Through its Operating Disaggregated Networks (ODiN) project, NGMN continues to shape and develop processes to enable the industry – operators and vendors – to efficiently manage the full lifecycle of disaggregated networks. The Cloud Native Manifesto will play an important role in advancing this work of NGMN to deliver a set of operating model blueprints for disaggregated networks. The ODiN project, led by Deutsche Telekom and co-led by Bell Canada and Smart/PLDT, working with the entire value chain at NGMN, will publish its next recommendations at MWC2024.

“As an industry alliance, we focus on collaboration, to unlock the smartest opportunities and to solve the biggest challenges the industry faces”, said Anita Doehler, CEO NGMN Alliance. “With this manifesto, coupled with the work of our ODiN project, we are providing a solid foundation for the industry to move forward at pace with adopting this key technology”, she added.

Further information and all publications of the NGMN Alliance can be found on the website: ngmn.org

Special acknowledgements go to the following Operator Members, who made significant contributions to the development of this publication: Bell Canada, BT, Chunghwa Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Smart/PLDT, Telia, TELUS, Turkcell, Vodafone.