Carrier-GradeAspen Mesh
Harness the speed and scalability of Kubernetes for cloud-native 5G network architectures.

Supporting the Next Generation of Connectivity
To support customer demand for 5G services, service providers are evolving from 4G monolithic architectures based on physical and virtual network elements to 3GPP service-based architectures leveraging web technologies like HTTP/2. Building containerized, interchangeable network services functions on top of a Kubernetes-based platform enables speed and scale. You get the speed to support high traffic volumes from the edge to the core — with the ability to scale quickly from tens of sites at the network core to tens of thousands of smaller cell sites at the edge.
Why Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh
Once you start to run containers across tens of thousands of edge sites, the only way to ensure they run efficiently, reliably and securely is by using service mesh to manage Layer 7 networking. Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh, a fully-supported service mesh based on Istio, gives you:

Enhancing and Hardening Kubernetes for Cloud-Native 5G Networks
Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh works in conjunction with BIG-IP Service Proxy for Kubernetes (SPK), developed by F5 specifically for cloud-native 5G networks. Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh and SPK help service providers transition to 5G while still leveraging investments in 4G. SPK provides signaling protocol support unavailable in the standard Kubernetes platform. Per-service secure proxy and firewall protect “north/south” traffic flowing into and out of containerized 5G services. Automated Kubernetes service discovery and policy configuration give you greater agility and engineering efficiency. Aspen Mesh provides observability, security, policy management and packet capture of East/West traffic within each 5G core Kubernetes cluster. The F5 solution can operate in both the edge and core of the network, flexibly scaling from tens of sites in the network core to tens of thousands of sites at the far edge.
