We are talking about Nokia or Ericsson or the actual provider? Since 15-20 years now the provider doesn't build anything. All that remains vaguely interesting is managed by subcontractors and externals. The actual number of people who are full time employees and still do tech at a telecom operator is close to 0. They are users of pre-built solutions and everything is offshore or managed by the firm that sold the software. This includes NFV, SDN, and the O&M plane, and other places (where actual innovation still happened in the past decade)
> 5g is deployed via K8s
Why is this a requirement of 5G and where can I learn more?
It’s not a requirement as such, it’s just that many of the major players have chosen to implement the constituent services via Kubernetes.