TOKYO – Rakuten Symphony and F5 today announced they will bring F5’s new BIG-IP Next Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs) to a global customer base through Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld™ marketplace. Representing the evolution of a longstanding relationship that began with F5 providing security functions to Rakuten Mobile, this collaboration aims to simplify the deployment of fully cloud-native security and networking functions for telecom operators.

F5 CNFs offer a rich set of capabilities, dynamic elasticity and scale, while supporting continuous deployment and automation, with a small footprint. Generally available later this year, the functions will include BIG-IP Next Edge Firewall CNF, BIG-IP Next Policy Enforcer CNF, BIG-IP Next DNS CNF, BIG-IP Next CGNAT CNF. They will support a variety of use cases that can be deployed in a simple and automated manner to secure and enhance 5G deployments.

Traditionally, the deployment of software applications in a mobile network requires manual testing and installation in a process that can last months, if not years. And, once in the network, lifecycle management of these applications can be slow and require substantial resources.

With the availability of F5 CNFs in the Symworld marketplace, Rakuten Symphony and F5 are working to accelerate and simplify this process for telecom operators through cloud-native functions and a delivery model that reduces application deployment from months and years to minutes and hours. This gives F5 quicker access to market and offers telecom operators a vastly improved network update cadence, critical for ensuring security.

F5's BIG-IP Next CNFs will also be deployed by Rakuten Mobile in its 5G network in Japan. This deployment is the result of three years of collaboration between Rakuten and F5 that included the roll-out of the first end-to-end fully virtualized 4G network in the world. Together F5 and Rakuten leveraged that experience to simplify operations and strengthen security and traffic optimization for Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native 5G deployment.

The Symworld marketplace was created to simplify the process of telecom application onboarding and making approved applications generally available for all Symworld customers. The Symworld platform digitalizes all telecom processes in live telecom networks; and makes Symworld marketplace applications quick and easy to deploy.

Rakuten