Exploring Camara and the Future of Network APIs with Ruben Flores & Ben Hepworth | Open Source Summit NA 2025

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Open Source Summit. We're here with Ben and Ruben, and we're talking about something called Cera, an open source project that's in the Linux Foundation that, as far as I understand, it puts a set of APIs in front of your network that makes it easier to invoke.

And who knows, maybe those network and DevOps people can get along. Gentlemen, welcome to show. Thank You for having us.

Alright, now your company is Cable Labs, right? And they are heavily involved in this project. So give us the backstory of how it came together and, and and what it does and because it's been around a little bit while and then maybe what's latest and greatest.

Sure. So Cable Labs is a nonprofit that does r and d for the cable industry, and our members pay us to get access to all of our patents in any code we write. So our members are companies like Comcast Charter or Rogers Vodafone.

And what we have going on there right now is a big initiative. I'm in the software group. They're, uh, called Network as a Service.

So, and that's when we got engaged in Kamara, um, about a year ago. And so what that means is we're trying to figure out, um, how to bring a wire line perspective to the Kamara project that started off as mobile first. And there's a lot of great APIs to interface, uh, with a mobile network.

The those same APIs can, uh, can, can sit on top of a wire network as well. So fraud detection is one example. If you're making a purchase on your phone or if you're on your home wifi, uh, financial institutions will be interested in making a call to be able to tell what level of confidence this is a fraudulent transaction or not.

So that's one example of a Kamara API that could be used both on the mobile front and on the wired front. Alright, Now, GSMA has been around a while. It's, it's venerable.

So how did you guys kinda get involved in this whole thing? Well, actually, um, GSMA get into this project with an open gate initiative, right? Um, open the Open Gate initiative, take part of kyara as, uh, the main, the the main flight to development, the kind of code that try to standardize these APIs, right?

The, the GSMA, uh, job in this ecosystem is to enable and convince and expose all the benefits that, uh, API at as, as the Kamara have. Um, you make it, uh, made it for the ecosystem to make more seamless connection between the layers of the value change of an enterprises or a, uh, channel partners and, and a mobile operators. With these exposures, APIs is going to be more seamless for everybody.

And the work of GSMA with the mobile work on support and with all the bands and with all the white papers and knowledge that we can bring to the table, we support this camera initiative with the open grade initiative around the world. So will this make not just the, the networks themselves a little more accessible, but can I maybe bring the various teams together around an API? 'cause there's developers, they're familiar with writing code, there's DevOps engineers that are managing infrastructure, but the network's always been kinda off to the side here a little bit.

So is this gonna at some point, converge a little bit more than we've seen in the past? Yeah, I think so. And, and you, you point out a, an interesting distinction where you've got, um, we call it northbound and southbound on the API.

So northbound is a third party application developer wants to consume these APIs could also be a network operator themself could consume their own APIs for some sort of support, uh, may maybe monitoring what whatever they want to do. They can use that also. But then the southbound side is once you get the intent, they, they're called intent based APIs.

You intend to interact with the network. The southbound side is then the network config behind it. That has to happen to make that possible.

For example, if you have an application developer writing a video streaming app, and they want to allocate dedicated bandwidth for a session, I need this amount of throughput and this amount of latency and jitter, they can create, uh, use the quality on demand API and create a session. And then on the southbound side, it makes everything happen to reserve that dedicated bandwidth session, whether on wireless or a wire line, uh, connection To his point, I feel like the applications we're trying to build are more distributed, they're more latency sensitive than ever. And are we gonna make it easier for developers to understand that?

Because I think a lot of times they write applications and they think the network will just magically do something. They're right. Well, that, that, that's the beauty of, of this, uh, camera wants that the developers community join this kind of effort in nor enrich that kind of code that that, that could, uh, have some kind of, um, uh, advance, uh, uh, project to, uh, to these APIs, right?

With this, with this, uh, saying these APIs has, has been, um, um, has been said, this API process get a, some kind of certification, right? That the GSMA is running when, when the certification, the developers contribute something kamara get right in the code, what a hundreds of APIs or the prior, the prioritization of APIs launched to the market, then get it into the certification process of GSMA that can, um, put it the stamp that say, Hey, this is a certification of GSMA with a ca with the camara code, with the developers that are, join this kind of community and enrich that kind of code. And with this, the ecosystem of the APIs of developers, channel partners, um, um, mobile operators with a camara coordination in the coding is going to expose this DSMA open gateway to all the operators around the world.

And that will be more consistent versus having 300 companies that implemented Kamara, but did it slightly differently. Well, as, as you say that you, you, you, you, you, you hit it is is going to be a seamless process for everybody, is going to create more value of, of the, uh, uh, in the, between the, the layers of the, of the ecosystem and is going to, um, prioritize the monetization of the 5G environment, right? In order to to, to have more, uh, uh, more and better products to the market.

They are, uh, uh, better coding, better, uh, knowledge of the developers community to enrich this kind of a, of APIs, right? It's, it's, it's a, it is a complete project that try to involve all the ecosystem around the world and as, as as, as Ben said, try to get it, uh, um, a seamless process north to south to south to north and to try to get it west is is west in a interoperability with the operators, right? That is, that is going to be the, the, the, the main objective at the end of this.

Yeah. So what's next for Kamara? You know, you're in charge of the skunk works, what's going on?

Yeah, so, um, Reuben mentioned East West APIs. I wanna talk about that for a minute because that is something that is actively going on right now. Um, so the north south we talked about already North is coming in from the application developer south, making the configuration on the network itself.

East West is now between different operators. So you might have a Verizon, at and t T-Mobile, Rogers Vodafone, uh, an application developer does not want to have to write to all of these different network operators to do the same thing, to check the availability, availability of a cell phone number, for example. That should be one API call.

So East West is now federating and connecting these different, uh, companies together in a, in one federated, API and Ericsson and Vonage announced a, uh, a split off company called aduna, which is working to achieve that. Exactly. So that's, that's on the mobile front and me at Cable Labs, we're working the same thing with our members trying to do a similar thing to federate, uh, the API calls and encourage all of our members to join Kamara and participate, uh, in the project.

How do the other folks watching this get involved? I mean, do I have to work for a telecom company or is this a community where you're inviting folks and where do they sign up? Yeah, so it's on GitHub, all the code is available, all the APIs that we define, we define the APIs and it's up to the network operators to then implement those APIs.

So we define the endpoints and the data schema behind the APIs, uh, and it's public. You can go look at it there. If you want to contribute, then you do need to sign a license agreement with, with the Linux Foundation and to join an actual, if you want to do like a pull request and push some code up to the project, then you do, then you have to join there, but you, it's free for anyone to go take a look at it.

com/kamara, project Kamara or Kamara Project Kamara Pro. I always Think, Right, Last question to you, we are all talking about AI agents, right? And there's gonna be, I don't know, millions of these eventually sitting on our networks that are all trying to call something through some sort of API is the current infrastructure that we're basing everything on really designed for that.

And, you know, does, do we need to kinda put a layer of isolation or abstraction between all these AI agents that are calling APIs so we can build out the infrastructure without necessarily like affecting the software? Well, that's, that's a very interesting question of these, um, the respo, the, the response is at this point of time, we need to get it into some kind of a step, right? We are going to get it into try to monetize the 5G with the resources that we already have, but now it's coming to six G and, and, and that is some awarding and, and, and, and papers and news that, uh, GSMA is bringing to the table with, with, with the, with all the white papers and information that we, that, that, that we have it for the AWA Congress and all the events that we organized.

But the response, the, the answer for your, for your question is yes, but we need to get it into, into, into some kind of step by step to support that kind of, uh, o of traffic or notification, uh, depending of this API's calling. And, but, um, but the responsible of all this is all the tech communications, um, change operators association, the developers, partner channels, everybody need to have, uh, uh, that in, in the top of their mind that we need to join that kind of, uh, uh, of technology step by step, but as soon as soon as they can, right? This is, um, get it involved budget and forecast and everything like that, but we need to get it into the first step to try to be prepared for theirs coming, right?

Because, uh, for this open Gateway initiative, uh, we saw that it's something that need to be done, right? Is, is, is, is a seamless process and um, is, is is going to benefit the ecosystem in technology in a seamless process with a correct monetization. I'd like to add one more thing, um, on the AI front.

Kamara did recently kick off an initiative to explore MCP, the model context protocol and try and figure out how do we make all of the API calls, um, so that AI can interact with them in an easier fashion. So we are actively looking into that as well. All Right.

And we were talking about a two A here at the show. Is that on your radar screen as well? Yes, We're, uh, we are actively working with A two A and using ag agentic AI to try and connect, um, these, these APIs.

All right. Yeah, Folks, there's an old joke that says, you know, what's the one thing that a developer and the person running servers can agree on? It's the network guy's fault.

Hopefully that won't be as funny as it used to be. Gentlemen, thanks for being on the chef. Thank you.

Thank you for having us. Thank you. All right.

And a pleasure. And we'll be back in a minute.