mizations that are needed to run the application code (microservice). This brings in the portability aspect of cloud-native applications, since the code is contained within the container and the execution environment is coupled with it; hence, it can be moved across and scaled easily. Building Blocks - Cloud Native Infrastructure Orchestration Layer Network Function Applications Faster Time to Market Prometheus kibana Infrastructure Scalability Grafana JAEGER Benefits Self-Healing of 5G Easier Upgrades docker kubernetes Istio Cloud Infrastructure Service Velocity Data Center Infrastructure Figure 3.2 - Cloud-native infrastructure This ushers in the capabilities of providing infrastructure as a service. Cloud-native infrastructure has containers that hold microservices carrying the application code. Since these containers are conventionally much smaller than virtual machines, they can be duplicated or moved around easily. The cloud-native method of application development also results in a faster development time, as modular coding and service-based design are inherently present. Service-based architecture As 5G has been developed on cloud principles, 5G NFs also follow web-scale application principles, SO it is designed in a manner in which the NFs provide and consume services to and from each other. Hence, 5G is based on a producer-consumer model. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has chosen to use the widely adopted Representational State Transfer (REST) model to support communication between various NFs in 5G. A Service-Based Architecture (SBA) is a system architecture in which the functionality of the system is achieved by applications providing services and consuming services to and from each other. In the context of a 5G core, a service-based interface is between two NFs that provide or consume a service to or from each other. Figure 3.3 portrays the producer-consumer model of communication. In this example, consider three applications - Application A hosting service A, Application B hosting ser