Intent-based 5G UPF configuration via Kubernetes Operators in the Edge

Abstract

The expected growing number of edge clouds in the telecommunication industry requires new types of configuration management approaches in order to deal with the increased complexity. The Kubernetes Operator pattern widely used for lifecycle management of cloud native applications could be also applied to network management and configuration. In this paper we present our approach on using Kubernetes Operators to automatically adapt the configuration of the edge-located User Plane Functions (UPFs) to intents coming from an Edge Application. The owner of the Edge Application does not need to deal with network-related configuration as the chain of Kubernetes Operators manage it. Furthermore, we also provide numerical results about the speed of automatic configuration.