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Nephio Release 3 Unveiled: Transforming Open Cloud-Native Automation into Reality

By July 31, 2024No Comments

Authors: 

  • Kandan Kathirvel, TSC-Chair, Nephio
  • Sana Tariq, TSC Vice-Chair, Nephio

Greetings to the Telecommunications and Enterprise Industry!

In a testament to our community’s collaborative spirit and unwavering dedication, we present Nephio R3. This Nephio release represents a leap forward, providing more real-world solutions for telecommunications and enterprises looking to embrace the benefits of cloud-native technologies.

The latest version of Nephio, Nephio Release 3, enhances the capabilities introduced in Release 1 and Release 2. R3 is themed to strengthen the platform and support O-RAN automation. This release focuses on improving the functional robustness, stability, and usability of the Nephio core components. Additionally, significant effort has gone into enhancing documentation and simplifying developer workflows, making it easier for new developers to join the Nephio community. Several O-RAN user stories have been evaluated in preparation for implementation in future releases.

Following are the release highlights and additional details can be found in the release notes.

  1. Web UI: Received refresh, new tabs and security fixes
  2. Packages Management: Catalog fixes, packages to deploy OSC RIC
  3. Core Platform: Several porch enhancements
  4. Documentation: Improvements to overall documentation, including updated Component architecture, Updated Schema catalog, and moreover versioning support
  5. Security: OpenSSF best practices score improved from 3.6 to 7.6, release digital signing automation, and enhanced vulnerability reporting process

The community aims to test additional experimental features for demonstrations and experimentation before deciding to incorporate them into the main releases. Such details can also be found in the release notes for further reading.

Looking Ahead: The Roadmap

As Nephio continues its journey, the community has outlined a roadmap to guide future endeavors. This roadmap includes delivering user journeys to enhance the core platform, package management, enhanced support for multiple clouds, multi-domain support (Transport, Wireline), stronger collaboration with Project Sylva and Camara, and other relevant projects.

The Nephio community has built good industry momentum and participation since inception, and it expects more lighthouse deployments by telcos and enterprises of release 3 and beyond. Many vendors are already incorporating Nephio and its principles into their products. More real-world market feedback is essential to the community, and the community welcomes such feedback from vendors, cloud providers, telecommunications, and enterprises.

The Nephio community already sees participants bring more enterprise use cases, and the community explores and supports more enterprise use cases beyond Telco.

Nephio realizes that the support of AI is essential to simplifying the journey for users, and the community looks forward to working on these areas outlined in the picture below.

As the Nephio community embarks on this next release, we welcome all to participate in crafting an open cloud-native platform that is both robust and versatile. Refer documentation here

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Nephio community of developers who made R3 possible. Together, we are not only shaping the future of network automation but also solidifying the foundation of a vibrant and thriving community. Let us continue to strive for excellence as we navigate the ever-changing technological landscape.

View Nephio reference Release notes

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