VNFs represented an important step in the journey to greater agility for telcos and their partners. But as telecommunications services become ever more demanding on network infrastructure, vendors need to address some of the fundamental limitations of VNFs and move to a more manageable, scalable, automated means of meeting customers’ needs.

Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs, also known as Containerized Network Functions) deployed on Linux container infrastructure enable service providers to embrace the benefits of a cloud-native approach which increases resource efficiency, reduces downtime, scales to meet demand, and accelerates application delivery.