The CORD community has extensively deployed the CORD platform and its applications in a variety of Service Provider laboratories. This allowed both developers to better understand requirements, and operators to experience how such new-generation, open-source telco platforms should be deployed on the field. The feedback of such activities has been collected and feeded into the CORD backlog, the platform has been completely re-designed, and released in 2018. The new platform is distributed as a set of containers that can run on top of any Kubernetes cluster, drawing a clear demarcation line between CORD and Operators’ responsibilities. Major advantages of this approach include separation of concerns, well defined abstractions and modularity, thus shifting the focus of the CORD Community from infrastructure provisioning to the implementation of CORD core functionalities, and leaving at the same time Operators the freedom to decide how to provision their infrastructure, from bare metal systems up to Kubernetes. The presentation will describe the new CORD platform architecture and its components. It will give a practical overview of a typical deployment scenario, and will report the lesson learnt from previous deployment experiences.
