At AWS, we spend a lot of our time talking to our customers and constantly learning from them. We also spend a lot of cycles working with not just global operators but also ISVs and developers focused on the 5G RAN space, network functions, and telco OSS/BSS platforms. In 2022, the industry will pivot to the Telco Cloud. This blog post will introduce this concept to readers.
Previous blogs on Software Defined Datacenters have covered changes in industries such as FSI – https://www.vamsitalkstech.com/cloud/financial-services-it-begins-to-converge-towards-software-defined-data-centers/ . Prior to the advent of K8s and Cloud-Native functions, network functions (NFs) were primarily deployed by CSPs as a combination of physical appliances and some VMs. This model has inherent limitations in terms of agility as well as the times to deploy new NFs. It also causes a lot of manual work leading to teams of expensive human operators. With mobile consumers expecting cheaper and more interesting services from operators, both the CSPs and the NEPs (Network Equipment Providers) are forced to offer services as software-based functions.
Thus, the Telco Cloud is an idea whose time has come. The Telco Cloud is nothing but a manifestation of the “must need” capabilities. It is depicted below and can be defined as a software and API-driven datacenter/edge architecture that can dynamically support massive numbers of users, millions of 5G enabled devices, large development organizations & highly distributed operations teams. The Telco Cloud is inherently multi-tenant in nature and includes the following key characteristics.
- the ability to grow the deployment footprint dynamically (Scale-up) as well as to decrease the footprint (Scale-down) based on edge and 5G Radio application requirements
- the ability to gracefully handle failures across tiers that can disrupt application availability
- Support a “builders mentality” by enabling large telco operator development teams to build applications using an open programming model
- the ability to work with virtually any kind of open infrastructure (compute, storage and network) implementation
- Support managed and unmanaged service implementations
Conclusion
The Telco Cloud will be built on concepts such as microservices, containers and hybrid architectures. The next blog will cover a reference architecture that enables all the key capabilities we have been discussing in the context of Containers and Kubernetes as applied to the 5G space.