Cloud and Virtualization Test & Assurance

The Lab-to-Live white paper, produced in partnership with Appledore Research, explores the critical shift required for modern networks to adopt a seamless testing and deployment approach. As cloud-native networks become central to enabling scalable, resilient, and agile infrastructure, traditional testing methods can no longer keep up. Lab-to-Live is a holistic strategy that integrates lab testing, network deployment, and operational monitoring into a unified lifecycle, fostering continuous improvement and stronger collaboration across development and operations. __Key takeaways__ from this research emphasize the importance of agile testing environments and proactive monitoring for cloud-native network resilience. With networks increasingly defined by software-driven applications, ensuring reliability involves rapid fault recovery and a shift from hardware-based resilience to software-based fault tolerance. This approach leverages continuous testing and visibility across all network components to proactively address failures, optimize resource usage, and support multi-vendor environments.

As 5G technology continues to evolve, the challenge of ensuring that cloud-native network functions (CNFs) operate reliably in distributed environments becomes increasingly critical. With the complex architecture of 5G standalone networks, it’s essential to anticipate failures before they occur—and recover automatically without disrupting service. Kubernetes auto-healing capabilities provide a path forward, but CNFs themselves are designed to fail, making the resiliency of your network more important than ever. In our whitepaper, __How 5G CNFs Are Designed to Fail__, we explore the core concepts behind building resilient 5G CNFs within Kubernetes environments. Learn how to prepare for inevitable system failures and maintain service continuity even in the most challenging real-world scenarios.

Cloud-native networks offer tremendous benefits – greater agility, faster release time, shorter time-to-market, lower costs, and the potential for telcos to avoid vendor lock-in. As network providers race to take advantage of clouds, how can they ensure that their services operate as promised and their customers enjoy the superior experience they expect? Hybrid clouds require enhanced collaboration with vendors and heightened vigilance against cyberattacks. In this paper, we look at the trends that are driving these challenges, particularly the move to hybrid clouds, and examine how test and assurance needs to evolve to support the agile new services running on cloud-native networks.

Emerging realities in cloud environment now require lab-to-live testing approach, powered by automation. Insights into this new test approach are discussed.

With reduced costs and improved performance, the move to the cloud comes with benefits. However, a thoughtful approach should be taken for a clear path to success.

Underlying architectures of 5G cloud environments are more dynamic than ever where lab and pre-production testing techniques must evolve to ensure resilience in the production network.