In its purest form, 5G is described as “cloud-native,” meaning that network workloads traditionally performed in purpose-built boxes are now run as software instances in centralized and decentralized cloud computing infrastructure. A parallel trend here is network disaggregation wherein hardware and software are decoupled, allowing operators much greater optionality compared to integrated systems. Open RAN is a great example of how operators are approaching multi-vendor radio systems and embracing distributed cloud computing to operate and optimize the radio access network.
