VNF vs CNF: why telecom is moving to cloud-native

From Virtual Machines to Containers

The telecom industry has undergone a fundamental infrastructure transformation over the past decade. Initially, network functions ran on proprietary hardware appliances, tightly coupling software to specific vendor platforms. The first wave of transformation introduced Virtual Network Functions, which decoupled software from hardware by running network functions inside virtual machines on commercial off-the-shelf servers. While VNFs brought flexibility, they still carried the overhead of full operating system instances. Cloud-Native Network Functions represent the next evolution, packaging…