Ella Core
Ella Core is a mobile core designed for private networks. It consolidates the complexity of traditional mobile 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 mobile connectivity: in a factory, a warehouse, a farm, a stadium, a ship, a military base, or a remote location.
Key features
- 4G and 5G Compliant: Ella Core implements 3GPP-standard interfaces and has been validated with multiple 4G and 5G radios, including integrated and software-defined RANs, commercial phones and devices. It is 5G RedCap compliant for IoT deployments.
- 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 mobile 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.
- Data, Voice, and SMS: Data is built in. Integrate with an IMS for VoLTE and VoNR voice and video calls, and with an SMSC for SMS.
- Enterprise Network Integration: Plug into your existing network with BGP, VLANs, and VRFs. Define permitted network flows per subscriber, enforce them in the user plane, and track subscriber traffic and usage in real time.
- AI-Native API: Complete RESTful API and Go client for automation and integration. Manage your network programmatically or let AI agents do it securely using the OpenAPI specification and AI agent skill.
- Easy to Operate: Manage your private network through a user-friendly embedded web interface. Monitor network health with real-time observability: logs, metrics (Prometheus), traces (OTel), profiles, and dashboards. Keep track of who did what and when with audit logs, and back up and restore your data in 1 click.
Quick Links
Tenets
Building Ella Core, we make engineering decisions based on the following tenets:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
License
Ella Core is licensed under Business Source (BUSL-1.1).
You need a Production License to run Ella Core in production. For more information, view our License FAQ.
Acknowledgements
Ella Core could not have been built without the following open-source projects: