5G standard emerges at a particular time in technology history when cloud transforms deeply almost all industries and services: it becomes obvious that innovations have to be made cloud-native for being successful. Cloud has however, so far, had only limited benefits on Telco infrastructure with ETSI NFV trying to adapt the rigid Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) model and Cloud RAN being essentially only a (partially) virtualised RAN. We think there is a risk for 5G to remain a niche connectivity gap-filler largely ignored by cloud applications and services boom if another better model is not adopted. NGPaaS has the ambition to transform this risk into a resounding success.
We think 5G must become the ubiquitous fabric blending universal connectivity (to humans, robots, sensors…) with cloud versatility and scalability. For realising this vision, another model than IaaS must be adopted, a model derived from the cloud service providers themselves, a model made by developers for the developers, the Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS). PaaS promises to deliver network services and applications with higher agility and performance as “ancillary services” such as scalability, high availability, state management, communications… are provided once by the PaaS: developers and service providers are therefore able to concentrate only on their applications and businesses, iterations are faster thanks to DevOps. An ideal 5G PaaS should not only facilitate building, shipping and running classical virtual network applications (VNF) with “telco-grade” quality, it should also combine all sort of third-party applications with those VNF for creating new more versatile and powerful cloud objects, breaking silos between connectivity and computing. Such a 5G PaaS does not exist today, NGPaaS build it.
A new 5G cloud-native stack centered on a telco-grade PaaS, Dev-For-Operations processes supporting a multi-sided platform between operators, vendors and third-parties, and a new refactored OSS model, has been proposed and named NGPaaS. We implement several “laser-focused” versions of NGPaaS for supporting Telco, vertical and combined scenarios (identified here as 5G). We deploy and validate these PaaSes iteratively, first in cloud using ‘virtual siblings’, then in the laboratory and finally over a live site at the Paris-Saclay campus.
For that, a set of innovative design rules have been proposed, implemented and tested: 1) Components modularity and ‘Build-to-order’ principle, 2) Recursivity and polymorphism, 3) Unstructured cloud-computing stack, 4) Telco-grade enhancements, and 5) Project integrated system.
