Authors: Sana Tariq, TELUS (TSC Chair), Ciaran Johnston, Ericsson (TSC vice Chair)
Greetings to the Telecommunications and Enterprise Industries!
As the newly elected TSC Chair and Vice Chair of Nephio, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Nephio Release 4 (R4), a major step forward in our mission to enable open, cloud-native automation for telecom and enterprise networks. Building on the solid foundations of R1, R2, and R3, this release introduces significant advancements in functionality, usability, and security, with a strong focus on production-grade deployments and O-RAN integration.
Key Highlights of Nephio R4 include:
- O-RAN IMS Integration: R4 introduces support for the (pre-standard) O-RAN O2 Infrastructure Management Service (IMS), enabling declarative lifecycle management of O-Cloud resources aligned with O-RAN standards. In addition, the (pre-standard) O-RAN SMO FOCOM interface is supported, with the aim of providing a full end-to-end O-RAN cluster lifecycle management use case, from the SMO to the O-Cloud. This milestone resolves key blockers and allows operators to automate Kubernetes cluster provisioning at scale.
- FluxCD GitOps Automation: Native FluxCD integration for workload management empowers GitOps-driven workflows for network function (NF) deployments, improving consistency, drift detection, and self-healing capabilities. This is offered as an alternative to the also-supported ConfigSync mechanism, to provide flexibility in the choice of automation tools used to manage clusters and workloads
- Platform improvements: enhanced performance and stability, with significant improvements to build and test infrastructure, internal architecture, configurability, observability, scalability, and security. APIs have been improved, larger packages are supported, cache handling is improved, and the system is much more stable and scalable than before
- UI enhancements: the new parametric editor allows users to provide resource-specific configuration on Nephio resources, while the Configurable Editor is enhanced to improve specification of complex, multi-level Kubernetes resources.
- A refreshed user interface with real-time topology dashboards, one-click troubleshooting tools, and a new drag-and-drop Template Studio to simplify package customization.
- Security Enhancements: Progress on workload identity management with early SPIFFE/SPIRE integration for cryptographic identity issuance, laying the groundwork for zero-trust automation.
- Other improvements include improved developer experience with support for modern IDEs, as well as a number of dependency upgrades and security fixes.
Nephio Release 4 is the result of incredible collaboration from over 250 contributors across 45 organizations. We extend our deepest gratitude to everyone involved in making this milestone possible. Your efforts continue to drive innovation in cloud-native network automation.
Looking ahead, Nephio’s roadmap includes continued implementation of O-RAN use cases, further security and performance improvements, deeper collaborations with projects like Sylva and CAMARA, and exploration of generative AI (GenAI) to simplify intent generation and workflows.
Complementing the Nephio R4 launch, we’re excited to share the new Nephio white paper: “Nephio and GenAI: Transforming Cloud Native Network Automation.” It explores how Nephio and GenAI enable AI-authored configurations, automated troubleshooting, and dynamic performance monitoring, streamlining deployments and reducing manual tasks. The paper also highlights how Nephio’s GitOps-driven framework supports intent-driven, closed-loop network management.
We invite you to join us on this transformative journey! Participate in our upcoming Nephio R5 Summit or contribute directly via our GitHub repositories. Together, we can build an open, secure, and scalable future for network automation.
Explore Nephio Release 4 today at Nephio GitHub, peruse our release notes for more details, dive into the documentation to learn the details, and join the community to help shape what’s next!
