NF discovery in K8s: NRF + K8s Services + DNS-based discovery

NRF and Kubernetes Service Discovery

The Network Repository Function is the 5GC component responsible for NF registration, discovery, and status management. In a Kubernetes environment, NRF functionality can leverage native service discovery mechanisms. Each NF registers its profile with the NRF at startup, advertising its supported services, capacity, and location. Other NFs query the NRF to discover available instances of the services they need. Kubernetes headless services expose individual pod IP addresses through DNS SRV records, providing a foundation that NRF implementations can build upon rather than maintaining…