Container technology in the 5G scalability

Nowadays, applications are becoming more complex and the demand for faster and more scalable development is growing. This translates into improvements and optimizations that affect infrastructure, processes and IT equipment.

Container technology represents the solution to meet the demand and growth of new technologies and applications, since it reduces costs in infrastructure, processes and development, as well as reducing compatibility conflicts in operating systems and facilitates the mobilization of applications from one environment to another.

Containers are another step in the evolution of how we develop, implement and manage applications, can reduce the problems and make faster repetitions in various environments. They are technologies that allow packaging and isolating applications together with all the environment they need during their execution time, that is, with all the necessary files so that they can be executed. This allows moving the application that is in the container from one environment to another (development, test, production, etc.), without losing any function.

Developers can focus on their applications and the infrastructure operations sector. Container technologies, including CRI-O, Kubernetes, and Docker, help your team simplify, accelerate and coordinate the development and implementation of applications.

Considering all the benefits of container technology, and thinking about the applicability in all technological and economic sectors, it is easy to think that the containers represent the only viable route to build and scale 5G networks. The complexity of orchestration and security issues are still under development by the 5G community, but what we can be sure of is that the speed of deployment, portability, the higher density and the efficient scalability that containers can provide, represent the immediate focus in this revolution of the networks.

Today, most virtualization network (VNF) functions in the mobile space have been performed on virtual machines, but moving to containers can make some processes much easier, such as increasing density and scalability.
The 5G vision is one of the empowerments of society in networks through three main use cases: improved mobile broadband, mass communications of machine type and ultra reliable and low latency communications. These use cases lead to a diverse and often contradictory set of requirements that can only be realized economically through the development of native network functions in the cloud that provide discrete network segments. Virtualization and containerization are, therefore, fundamental tools for this.

The containerized approach means that the main IMS microservices (IP Multimedia Subsystem) are implemented in separate containers, which include a SIP routing microservice, an HSS proxy microservice, together with multiple databases and a configuration distribution service Open Source.

The containers must mature in the space of the telecommunications companies as they have done in the business space, especially with regard to orchestration, however there are already powerful tools like Kubernetes, used today for container orchestration, it is capable of supporting the complexity of a large number of containers, with far fewer management and configuration requirements than is currently required in telecommunications.