/
Nephio R5 Launch: solidifying the foundation

Nephio R5 Launch: solidifying the foundation

Authors: Sana Tariq, TELUS (TSC Chair), Ciaran Johnston, Ericsson (TSC vice Chair)

Hello to our friends and associates in the automation community!

As the Chair and Vice Chair of the Nephio Technical Steering Committee, we are excited to announce the upcoming launch of Nephio Release 5 (R5), another significant milestone in our journey to enable open, cloud native automation for telecom and enterprise networks.

Building on the strong foundations of Releases 1 through 4, R5 brings further advancements in functionality, usability, security, and scalability in readiness for wider adoption and new use cases.

Some key enhancements coming in R5 include:

  • support for multiple reconciliation agent types (ArgoCD and FluxCD) on workload clusters

  • further platform improvements to Porch that boost scalability and robustness

  • support for bare metal clusters

  • expanded observability parameters in preparation for assurance features planned for R6

  • improvements to the O-RAN cluster creation use case, and initial efforts toward transport orchestration with OAI

Looking forward, plans for R6 include:

  • Support for different git platform backends

  • Support for update / reconfiguration of NFs and clusters

  • observability of the Nephio platform components and use cases

  • transport use case

  • GenAI driven hydration

  • further performance, security and usability enhancements

Please come and join in the exciting journey as we build out this groundbreaking architecture into a fully fledged realisation of GitOps-based cloud native, intent driven closed-loop network management! New developers are encouraged to join in and new use cases are welcome.