Work is well underway on Release 6 of Nephio, which will be released at the end of 2025. In EST, we are primarily working on Porch enhancements with the Porch community. A number of important enhancements are already available in Porch pre-releases for R6.

  • Porch can now use PostgreSQL as well as etcd for internal storage of packages being composed into workloads. This allows us to support larger packages, larger workloads, and more edge clusters and makes implementation of disaster recovery and high availability easier
  • Schema driven 3 way merge is introduced for upgrades so users can specify how they want to merge upstream and local changes on resource level as well as on file level

We’re going to discuss some more enhancements to Porch at the Nephio Developer Summit from September 24-25. Top of the agenda are:

  • Making Porch a true Kubernetes operator rather than Porch managing its resources itself using the k8s API server
  • Making the Porch pipeline executions more efficient, Porch runs pipelines of kpt functions to perform package manipulations,
  • Improving the performance of interactions of Porch with Git. Operations towards Git are very expensive (each operation takes at least 500ms).

We’re well on the way to making Porch a carrier grade system for Package Orchestration.

Nephio:

Nephio is a Cloud Native Network Automation project that is part of  Linnx Foundation Networking (LFN). Nephio provides intent and AI driven composition, customization, and deployment of multi-vendor cloud infrastructure and hetwork functions on large scale edge deployments, see https://nephio.org and https://docs.nephio.org/docs/.

Nephio provides generic support for workload composition, specialization, and deplyment using the Porch  (Package ORCHestration) system and the Nephio controllers. Nephio also provides reference implementations for a number of network use cases, for exampleine the 5G Core and Open RAN domains.

EST has been working on Nephio since 2022. We have been heavily involved in the evolution of Porch into a system that can manage deployments of workloads to networks with tens of thousands of edge clusters. We have also made significant contributions to the test infrastructure and release toolchains in Nephio.

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Liam Fallon is chair of SIG Automation and Fiachra Corcoran is vice-chair of SIG Release in Nephio.