Red Hat and Intel have announced an extension of their relationship to accelerate an automated cloud-native infrastructure for 5G services.

Together, they will align research and development efforts to ensure 5G networking innovation and features quickly move into upstream, open-source projects and are rapidly commercialized.

Red Hat OpenShift will pair with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Ethernet Network Adapters, FlexRAN reference software and Open Network Edge Services Software, an edge computing software toolkit.

With this combination of technologies, eco-system solution vendors will be able to develop cloud-native network functions that can realize the benefits of 5G accelerated infrastructure and system resources.

In turn, communications service providers will further benefit from having flexible deployment models, whether on-premise as bare metal or via public or hybrid cloud.

According to the companies, Intel architecture and Red Hat OpenShift form the technology backbone of a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architecture strategy for telco cloud that is also multi-vendor. Enterprises equally benefit from unified management and orchestration from edge to cloud.

Earlier this year, Red Hat and Intel announced the creation of a cloud-based onboarding service and testbed for network functions, supporting both virtualized network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs).

Red Hat and Intel have had several partners through the lab and are engaged with the 5G Core and RAN ecosystem to expand the lab this year.