The first week of April, from March 31st to April 4th will be a huge week for cloud native and Telco in London, and it will be a great opportunity to highlight how much telecom is connected to open source ecosystems.
Starting the week of March 31st, Linux Foundation Networking is organizing the Open Networking & Edge Summit 2025 that will gather alongside the cloud native ecosystem to shape the future of Domain Specific AI, Cloud Native, 5G/6G, and Edge/IOT. Having the Open Networking & Edge Summit at the starting week of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 is reflecting the telecom industry’s major shift towards cloud-native infrastructure. Innovations in technologies like Kubernetes and containerization are driving more adaptable and efficient models and transforming the lifecycle of network functions from core to RAN. These progressive transformations facilitate disaggregation, automation, and dynamic scalability, transforming the way networks are designed and managed. Learn more about the Linux Foundation Networking Open Networking & Edge Summit and register here.
The week will start like a rocket as March 31st will also have a Sylva Dev Day, a full day dedicated to the Linux Foundation Europe hosted Sylva project aiming at bringing an industrial grade cloud native telco stack to manage network functions considering Core, RAN and Edge with a proper framework, a reference implementation, and network function validation centers. Production grade live for one year, Project Sylva has around 30 companies contributing, with 60 active developers that just released Sylva v1.4 and with already 16 network functions validated. The Sylva Dev Day offers a thrilling chance for telecommunications professionals and technologists from diverse sectors to discover how Project Sylva can benefit their industry! The aim is to bring everyone together to collaboratively discuss key issues, welcome new partners, and engage in casual networking. 50+ people from 14 different companies already confirmed their presence, Telecom operators and industrials. Learn more about the Sylva project and the Sylva dev day.
During the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 co-located events on April 1st, Cloud Native Telco Day Europe will bring together the Networking and Cloud Native open source communities, where telecom operators, vendors and Cloud Service Providers collaborate to share lessons learned and new concepts applicable across both worlds. (Cloud Native Telco Day Europe is part of the All Access Pass for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 – register here!) It will be an opportunity to show how much Network Service Providers and Telco operators are rapidly adopting the latest CNCF technologies and transforming their infrastructure to become agile and address end user demands. While doing so they are blurring the lines between the network and the Cloud, creating synergy opportunities between the CNCF ecosystem and the Networking industry verticals.
On the closing day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, April 4th, Faseela K will gather for a dedicated keynote “Cloud Native Evolution in Telecom – 5G, 6G and Beyond!”, with Tom Kivlin, Philippe Ensarguet and Joel Studler to explore how Vodafone, Orange and Swisscom are leveraging CNCF projects in their network transformation journey! It will be an opportunity to highlight how telco is connected to cloud native open source ecosystems like Sylva, already presented above, but also Linux Foundation Networking CNTi (Cloud Native Telco initiative) focusing on best practices and validation/certification, OpenSSF, and in particular for the SLSA security framework, Linux Foundation Project Camara, aiming at defining, developing, and testing APIs to enable seamless access to telco network capabilities, particularly in 4G and 5G networks, and Linux Foundation Project Nephio, focusing on automating and managing cloud-native network functions. Find more details about the keynote timing.
Finally, it’s impossible to close this post connecting Telco ecosystem to Cloud Native without saying how much the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is representing the very core foundations we are relying on, and its major projects covering orchestration and management, runtime, observability and analysis, provisioning and security, continuous integration and delivery, and application definition to make the Telco cloud native network functions (CNF) running successfully.
The countdown has already started, see you in London!
Reference links to open source telco communities, initiatives and projects:
- Contribute to the CNCF Ecosystem | CNCF Contributors
- Cloud Native Telecom Initiative https://lfnetworking.org/cloud-native-telecom-initiative/
- Nephio https://nephio.org/
- Sylva Project https://sylvaproject.org/
- Open SSF https://openssf.org/
- Camara Project https://camaraproject.org/
- Anuket https://anuket.io
- Cloud Native Telco Forum https://github.com/swisscom/cloud-native-telco/blob/main/cntf/README.md
Find a curated and up-to-date list of cloud native telco communities, initiatives and projects.