5G, as it continues to develop and be built out, is envisioned as a flexible connectivity medium that trades off proprietary equipment for a cloud-native architecture supported by low-cost, white box server hardware.  

A service-based architectural approach will break down a 5G service chain into individual components capable of communicating with one another through implementation-independent interfaces; microservice can be distributed within a 5G network to make it easier for operators to spin-up new services quickly, much in the way webscale players like Amazon or Baidu.