Overview¶
F5’s Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) deliver full-proxy security and traffic management use-cases, designed for communication service provider (CSP) 5G networks. CNFs integrates F5’s containerized Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM), Ingress Controller, and Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) into the Azure Operator Nexus (AON) Platform, to secure, proxy and optimize low-latency 5G workloads.
Components¶
CNFs software comprises these primary components:
BIG-IP Controller¶
The BIG-IP Controller watches the Kube-API for Custom Resource (CR) update events, and configures both the Edge Firewall and Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) Proxy Pods based on the update.
Custom Resource Definitions¶
Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) extend the Kubernetes API, enabling Edge Firewall and TMM to be configured using CNFs’ Custom Resource (CR) objects. CRs configure Edge Firewall and TMM to inspect and protect 5G application traffic. CRs also configure TMM’s DNS Caching feature and networking components such as self IP addresses and static routes.
TMM Proxy Pod¶
The Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) Proxy Pod provide intelligent packet inspection, network address translation, and DNS caching. Additional Proxy Pod containers may also be installed to assist TMM with dynamic routing, logging collection and debugging.
Firewall Policy Compiler¶
The Firewall Policy Compiler Pod is comprised of a Packet Classification Compiler daemon (PCCD) that converts network firewall rules and CG-NAT configurations into binary large objects (BLOBs). BLOBS are optimized for fast lookup performance, and are then sent to the Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) Proxy Pod for traffic matching and processing.
Next step¶
Continue to the CNFs Release Notes for recent software updates and bug information.