ella-core

Ella Core

Ella Core is a 5G core designed for private networks. It consolidates the complexity of traditional 5G networks into a single application, offering simplicity, reliability, and security.

Typical mobile networks are expensive, complex, and inadequate for private deployments. They require a team of experts to deploy, maintain, and operate. Open source alternatives are often incomplete, difficult to use, and geared towards research and development. Ella Core is a production-geared solution that simplifies the deployment and operation of private mobile networks.

Use Ella Core where you need 5G connectivity: in a factory, a warehouse, a farm, a stadium, a ship, a military base, or a remote location.

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Key features

• Performant Data Plane: Achieve high throughput and low latency with an eBPF-based data plane. Ella Core delivers over 10 Gbps of throughput and less than 1 ms of latency.
• Lightweight: Ella Core is a single binary with an embedded database, making it easy and quick to stand up. It requires as little as 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, and 10GB of disk space. Forget specialized hardware; all you need to operate your 5G core network is a Linux system with a network interface.
• Highly Available: Deploy Ella Core as a high-availability cluster to ensure continuous operation with failover capabilities.
• Subscriber Traffic Control: Define permitted network flows per subscriber, enforce them in the user plane. Track subscriber traffic and usage in real time.
• AI-Native API: Complete RESTful API and Go client for automation and integration. Manage every aspect of your network programmatically — or let AI agents do it securely using the OpenAPI specification and ready-to-use AI agent skill.
• BGP Support: Advertise subscriber routes to your enterprise network and receive routes from BGP peers.
• Intuitive User Experience: Manage subscribers, radios, data networks, policies, and operator information through a user-friendly embedded web interface.
• Real-Time Observability: Access logs, metrics, traces, profiles, and dashboards to monitor network health through the UI, the Prometheus-compliant API, or an OpenTelemetry collector.
• Backup and Restore: Backup and restore your data in 1 click.
• 5G Compliant: Ella Core implements 3GPP-standard interfaces and has been validated with multiple 5G radios, including integrated and software-defined RANs, commercial phones and devices. It is 5G RedCap compliant for IoT deployments.
• Audit Logs: At any moment, keep track of who did what and when on your network.
• Source Available: Ella Core is available under the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1); each release converts to the Apache 2.0 license four years after publication.

Quick Links

• Website
• Documentation
• YouTube Channel
• Whitepaper
• Snap Store Listing
• Contributing

Tenets

Building Ella Core, we make engineering decisions based on the following tenets:

1. Simplicity: We are committed to developing the simplest possible mobile core network user experience. We thrive on having a very short Getting Started tutorial, a simple configuration file, a single binary, an embedded database, and a simple UI.
2. Reliability: We are commited to developing a reliable mobile network you can trust to work 24/7. We are committed to delivering high-quality code, tests, and documentation. We are committed to exposing dashboards, metrics, and logs to help users monitor their networks.
3. Security: We are committed to minimizing the private network's attack surface, using secure encryption protocols to protect our users' data, to provide audit mechanisms, to identify and fix vulnerabilities, and to provide a secure-by-default configuration.

Acknowledgements

Ella Core could not have been built without the following open-source projects:

• Aether
• eUPF
• free5GC