Abstract

Efficient scaling is essential for service providers supporting growing 5G and emerging 6G infrastructure. As traffic and service demands increase, optimizing finite resources such as CPU and memory helps operators expand capacity while maintaining service levels. With infrastructure costs continuing to rise, resource efficiency can directly influence capital expenditures (CapEx) and overall infrastructure utilization. F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition (CNE) is the Kubernetes-native deployment model for BIG-IP. It delivers trusted BIG-IP networking and security services—including DNS, CGNAT, AFM, and BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes—as cloud-native network functions (CNFs). CNE complements BIG-IP Hardware and Virtual Edition, giving customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best fits each workload and operating environment.

F5 commissioned Tolly to evaluate the infrastructure efficiency of BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition delivering DNS and L4+CGNAT services as cloud-native network functions in a Red Hat OpenShift environment and compare the results with the tested virtualized network function deployment.

Tests showed that BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition was more efficient with respect to both CPU resources and memory consumption in both DNS query processing and L4+CGNAT processing.