Post Event Blog Post
Highlights from the R6 Developer Summit
Date: September 26–27, 2025
Location: Eurecom Campus SophiaTech, Biot, France
The Nephio developer community came together at the Eurecom Campus Sofiatech in Biot, France, home of Open Air Interface and a leading European engineering school and research laboratory in the digital field, for a two-day face-to-face workshop focussed on evolving the Nephio code-base and documentation. This event marked a significant milestone in the lead-up to the R6 release, bringing together core contributors to align on low-level development details, refine tooling and release strategies, and improve documentation practices.
A Developer-Centric Agenda
The workshop agenda was tightly packed with technical sessions focussed on code quality improvements, integration with other ecosystems and improved technical and communications documentation. Some key highlights from the two days include:
Kpt Interworking:
A big focus was put on the usage of and interworking with kpt, the Kubernetes-native package management tool. The new maintainers of the kpt project overlap with the Nephio community and Nephio is heavily reliant on its capabilities. Discussions covered best practices for package composition, pipeline definitions, the KRM function catalog and the related SDKs. A clear goal was to ensure that kpt and porch are complementary functions and work seamlessly together.Documentation Improvements:
Recognizing the importance of clarity, usability and simplicity, the community dedicated time to discussing proposals to improve Nephio’s documentation. This included refining developer guides, clarifying API usage, and aligning on terminology.Release Strategy:
The current release process was reviewed, highlighing the challenges in getting a proper release, and a proposal to improve and streamline was discussed. The outcome of this needs to be reviewed with the TSC for the R7 release.Controller evolution:
The state of the Nephio controllers was presented, and proposals to simplify and deprecate aspects of these that are unused or unmaintained. This discussion maps into some of the rearchitecture work discussed.Kubenet integration:
Related to the Nephio controllers, the use of Kubenet and the possible improvements it brings once properly integrated were discussed. This is a challenging topic that will require effort but can bring significant gains.Scalability and characteristics:
Community members described challenges experienced in running Nephio in large-scale deployment scenarios, and discussed changes required including moving to a fully asynchronous operating model and improving the way the system interacts with git.Observability:
A key cornerstone of any automation system is the ability to observe the automation execution, so a discussion on how and why to introduce an observability framework into Nephio was welcomed by the community.Long-term architecture:
The community revisited the architectural principles underpinning Nephio, and considered synergies with standardization groups and other Linux Foundation projects such as Sylva. The impact of generative AI and the ability of Nephio to support simplified automation leveraging this paradigm-shifting technology was discussed. The need for a cohesive architecture with a well-defined core function and an independent set of use cases was presented as an enabler for these .
The workshop concluded with a renewed sense of a common vision, clear set of action items and priorities for the R6 release cycle. The energy and engagement throughout the event underscored the strength of the Nephio community and its commitment to building a robust, scalable platform for cloud-native network automation.
To complement this workshop, the Nephio community will soon run a webinar, where we will focus on new use cases, ecosystem synergies and outreach efforts for evolving workgroups. Watch this space for more information!
Want to get involved?
Join the conversation on the Nephio Slack, contribute on GitHub, or check out the LFN Wiki for more details.