The telecom industry’s transition toward cloud native network functions (CNFs) continues to accelerate, but cloud nativeness is not achieved simply by packaging applications into containers. Real cloud native maturity requires continuous validation against best practices for security, resilience, observability, lifecycle management, installability, and upgradability.

That is precisely the mission of the Cloud Native Telecom Initiative (CNTi) – an initiative under LF Networking focused on advancing confidence and consistency in cloud native telecom deployments through vendor-neutral best practices, testing, and validation.

Today, we are excited to announce an important milestone for the CNTi community:

The free5GC project is now being introduced as a reference Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) for the CNTi Test Suite.

This is an important step toward strengthening the practical usability and ecosystem adoption of the CNTi Test Suite. By validating the test suite against a real-world, open source 5G Core implementation, the community gains a continuously evolving benchmark for cloud native telecom workloads.

The collaboration also helps ensure that CNTi tests remain actionable, reproducible, and aligned with the operational realities faced by CNF developers and operators.

The free5GC team recently documented its experience integrating the CNTi Test Suite with free5GC deployments in their blog post, CNTi & free5gc-helm Integration.

Their work demonstrates how cloud native validation can directly improve CNF quality and operational readiness. During the integration effort, the free5GC community used CNTi recommendations and test feedback to improve several areas of cloud nativeness, including:

• Reducing dependencies on specialized networking components such as Multus-CNI
• Strengthening container security configurations
• Improving Kubernetes resource management and limits
• Aligning deployments with carrier-grade cloud native practices

The free5GC team described the CNTi Test Suite as a practical mechanism for evaluating telecom workloads against Kubernetes and cloud native best practices while providing actionable remediation guidance.

This is a perfect example of collaborative feedback loop CNTi aims to enable across the telecom ecosystem.

The CNTi community has been actively evolving the test suite to improve reliability, coverage, and usability for telecom workloads. As highlighted in the LF Networking “Call for Action” blog, one major focus area has been establishing open source reference CNFs – starting with free5GC – to continuously exercise and validate the test suite itself.

Reference CNFs provide several important benefits:

• They validate that tests work against realistic telecom workloads
• They expose gaps and ambiguities in cloud native best practices
• They improve CI/CD stability and test reproducibility
• They provide onboarding examples for vendors and operators adopting CNTi
• They accelerate community-driven improvements across projects

By introducing free5GC as a reference CNF, CNTi strengthens both the maturity of the test suite and the practical value it delivers to the ecosystem.

One of CNTi’s main goals is helping telecom workloads become more cloud native through three complementary areas: best practices, testing, validation, and verification.

The CNTi Test Suite specifically develops vendor-neutral functional and non-functional tests designed to validate cloud native behaviors in networking applications and infrastructure.

This includes areas such as:

• Kubernetes-native operational patterns
• Security hardening
• Resilience and lifecycle management
• Observability and logging
• Resource governance
• Deployment portability
• CNF operational best practices

The objective is not to create vendor lock-in or proprietary benchmarks, but rather to establish an open, collaborative framework that helps the entire industry improve cloud native telecom quality.

The collaboration with free5GC is also part of a broader ecosystem movement.

As highlighted in LF Networking’s 2025 Annual Report, CNTi has been working closely with the Sylva Project, where the CNTi Test Suite is integrated into the Sylva Validation Center to validate CNFs running on Sylva-compliant stacks.

This demonstrates how open source communities can work together to establish consistent cloud native validation pipelines across telecom platforms and workloads.

The free5GC integration demonstrates that adopting CNTi is not merely about passing tests – it is about continuously improving cloud native maturity.

We encourage CNF vendors, operators, and open source telecom projects to follow a similar path:

• Integrate the CNTi Test Suite into CI/CD pipelines
• Use test feedback to improve Kubernetes-native operations
• Contribute new tests and best practices back to the community
• Participate in ecosystem validation efforts such as the Sylva Validation Center
• Help evolve shared standards for cloud native telecom infrastructure

Cloud native telecom is ultimately a community effort. The stronger our shared validation tooling becomes, the more confidence operators and developers can have in deploying CNFs at scale.

The CNTi community welcomes contributors, adopters, and collaborators who want to help shape the future of cloud native networking.

To learn more or get involved:

• CNTi Initiative Overview
• CNTi Testsuite
• free5GC CNTi Integration Blog