The advent of 5G and Beyond 5G networks has propelled the development of innovative applications and services that harness network programmability, data from management and control interfaces, and the capabilities of network slicing. However, ensuring these applications function as intended and effectively utilize 5G/B5G capabilities remains a challenge, mainly due to their reliance on complex interactions with control plane Network Functions. This work addresses this issue by proposing a novel architecture to enhance the onboarding, orchestration, and validation of 5G/B5G-capable applications and services, while enabling the creation of application-tailored network slices. By integrating DevOps principles into the NFV ecosystem, the proposed architecture automates workflows for deployment, testing, and validation, while adhering to standardized onboarding models and continuous integration practices. Furthermore, we also address the realization of such architecture into a platform that supports extensive testing across multiple dimensions, including 5G readiness, security, performance, scalability, and availability. Besides introducing such a platform, this work also demonstrates its feasibility through the orchestration and validation of an automotive application that manages virtual On-Board Units within a 5G-enabled environment. The obtained results underscore the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, as well as the performance and scalability of the platform that materializes it. By integrating DevOps principles, our work aids in reducing deployment complexity, automating testing and validation, and enhancing the reliability of next-generation Network Applications, therefore accelerating their time-to-market.

The lack of testing and validation mechanisms for 5G Network Applications poses a severe challenge in ensuring their correct behavior and in reducing their time to market. This work addresses the intricate complexities of validating such Applications and defines some research questions related to this research field. These questions focus on problems that are still unresolved, and based on them we establish future directions for solving such intricate research problems.

NFV has risen to be a solution to abstract Network Functions from the hardware, providing numerous advantages to Network Operators. However, many challenges have appeared with the evolution of NFV. An example are the inter-domain scenarios where services are spanned across multiple independent domains. Using VPNs to interconnect all domains can attenuate the difficulties imposed by such scenarios. In this paper, we present a NFV-based solution for deploying full-mesh VPNs to interconnect different administrative domains, without manual intervention.

5G technologies provide several advancements regarding low latency and high bandwidth network scenarios, thus enabling new vertical use cases. Nonetheless, the lack of testing and validation mechanisms for NFV-based services poses a severe challenge in reducing their time to market. In this work we showcase a service to automate the validation of 5G NetApps, thus striving towards reducing the time to market of these applications, and introducing a new layer of trust in their reliability and availability.