The cloud-native core is certainly the best entry point for IT and data center vendors in the 5G ecosystem. Groundwork has been laid in the virtualization of the 4G evolved packet core (EPC), and even if the NFV-centric approach is rapidly looking outdated, it has been valuable to teach operators and suppliers about some of the challenges of making a large-scale core perform optimally on cloud infrastructure. In 5G, there will be many more opportunities for vendors to make a difference to operators’ performance by distributing the core widely, in conjunction with edge compute platforms, while supporting stripped-down enterprise cores, and moving to flexible microservices that allow both services and suppliers to be swapped and changed relatively easily. Some IT-centric…