Functions as service providers and consumers
Rather than treating every Core relationship as a fixed appliance-to-appliance interface, the service-based architecture defines network functions that expose services to authorised consumers. A function may provide several services and consume services from several other functions.
Registration and discovery
Network-function instances can register profiles with the NRF. Consumers can discover suitable providers based on service, location, capacity, slice support and other selection criteria.
Cloud-native operation
Functions can be deployed as software on cloud infrastructure, scaled horizontally and upgraded independently. This improves flexibility, but the underlying compute, storage, networking and state-management layers remain part of the reliability design.
Why this helps slicing
A slice can select a tailored combination of shared and dedicated functions without requiring a completely separate physical Core. Service discovery, automation and policy make this composition manageable at scale.