Capacity planning: right-sizing K8s clusters for NF workloads

Capacity Planning Methodology

Capacity planning for a cloud-native 5G Core requires understanding both the subscriber demand model and the resource consumption characteristics of each network function. The process begins with traffic modeling: projecting subscriber counts, peak registration rates, average session counts, and throughput requirements over a planning horizon of twelve to twenty-four months. These traffic projections are translated into NF instance counts using vendor-provided dimensioning guidelines that specify the capacity of each NF pod in terms of subscribers, transactions per second, or throughput.…