Feature Description

AMF consists of a three-tier architecture as the following:

  • Protocol

  • Service

  • Session

Each tier from this list includes a set of microservices (pods) for a specific functionality. Within these tiers, a Kubernetes Cluster exists. It comprises K8s or Kubernetes nodes such as master node and worker node (which also includes OAM nodes).

For high availability and fault tolerance, each tier requires a minimum of two K8s worker nodes. Each worker node can have multiple replicas for each worker node. Kubernetes orchestrates the pods using the StatefulSets controller. The pods require a minimum of two replicas for fault tolerance.

The following is a list of various nodes in the cluster. The following AMF Kubernetes Cluster depicts an AMF K8s cluster, with 12 nodes:

  • Three master nodes

  • Three OAM worker nodes

  • Two Protocol worker nodes

  • Two Service worker nodes

  • Two Session (data store) worker nodes

AMF Kubernetes Cluster

The K8s cluster supports the following nodes:

  • OAM worker nodes—Hosts the Ops Center pods for configuration management and metrics pods for statistics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

  • Protocol worker nodes—Hosts the AMF protocol-related pods for service-based interfaces (N11, N7, N10, N40, and NRF) and UDP-based protocol interfaces (N4 and S5/S8).

  • Service worker nodes—Hosts the AMF application-related pods that perform session management processing.

  • Session worker nodes—Hosts the database-related pods that store subscriber session data.