F5 is upgrading its customer support chat feature on My.F5.com. Chat support will be unavailable from 6am-10am PST on 1/20/26. Refer to K000159584 for details.

Introducing F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions for Red Hat OpenShift

5G and Red Hat OpenShift 5G standards have embraced Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) for implementing network services in software as containers. This is a big change from previous Virtual...
Updated Jun 05, 2023
Version 3.0
announcement
big-ip next
cloud
devops
red hat
Red Hat OpenShift
Ulises_Alonso's avatar
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Solutions architect in Business Development with focus in automation and integration with partner's technologies. Prior to this role I was consultant in Professional Services and escalations engineer in Technical Support. Outside F5, I worked in mobile and wired network operators as network engineer. I started my career in academic research. In all these years, no matter what I've been doing Linux has been always the best tool. Not the one in the picture :-)
View Profile
Nikoolayy1's avatar
Nikoolayy1
Icon for MVP rankMVP
Oct 27, 2024

Ulises_Alonso great article! Can I ask when CNF are used and when it is better to use BIG-IP Next SPK as I am still not clear on that part?

  • Ulises_Alonso's avatar
    Ulises_Alonso
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Feb 20, 2025

    Hi Nikolay

    Sorry for the overlook, I was away when you posted this.

    CNFs are meant mainly for 5G user plane traffic (pass through traffic) and SPK are meant for ingress/egress traffic to PODs hosted in the cluster. Both SPK and CNF are going to be re-branded/re-architected under the common BNK product (BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes) 

    I hope this clarifies it