The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification Program. The program will help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and other telecommunications organizations identify which Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) follow cloud native best practices.

The CNF Certification Program runs on CNCF’s CNF Test Suite and supports any product that runs in a certified Kubernetes environment. The CNF Test Suite is an open source test suite for telcos to validate how well they are following cloud native principles and best practices, like immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs. It leverages 10 CNCF-hosted projects and several open source tools, including Fluentd, Helm, Jaeger, and Prometheus.

Currently, the CNF Test Suite can run approximately 70 workload tests, which are segmented into seven different categories, including:

• Compatibility, Installability & Upgradability
• Microservice
• State
• Reliability, Resilience & Availability
• Observability & Diagnostics
• Security
• Configuration

To get started, NEPs and CNF creators can self verify an application using the CNF Test Suite and submit results via pull request. Organizations that may not be ready to submit their results can still get started with the CNF Test Suite and use it to improve the “cloud-nativeness” in their products.

CNFs that pass the CNF Certification will be considered ‘Certified,’ with more advanced levels to come as the program expands.