Architecting the infrastructure that powers today and tomorrow's limitless connectivity
Manpasu Mathias
Cloud Native Architecture | Distributed Systems | Cloud Automation | IoT
Introduction
The world as we know today, would not have been where it is without the discoveries of two legendary minds, Heinrich Hertz and Gulglielmo Marconi.
Like a ripple in the cosmic pond, their discoveries set off ripple effect that has forever changed the world.
Electromagnetic wave or EM wave as it is often called, has not only laid the foundation for wireless communication, it has become the backbone of our modern world.
It has changed the way we communicate, the way we see and interact with our surroundings. We have been able to explore and is still exploring the mysteries that lies beyond the horizon, a world that was once a mystery to us. For lack of a better expression, EM wave has changed the way we do things.
EM wave is all around us, from the microwave ovens in our kitchens to the handheld systems that has become part of our daily lives. When we make calls or send text messages, we are constantly being bombarded by EM wave.
Radio wave, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma rays are all types of EM radiations and they all make up what is called the EM spectrum.
Imagine a world without EM radiations - thick darkness everywhere, no medium for conveying sound, worst of all, we will be disconnected because EM wave which is the backbone of our modern communication systems isn't there to connect our systems.
Wireless communication and the modern-day Telephony
Telecommunication has made communication almost at a light speed - whether it's human to machine or machine to machine, whatever the distance, your message is just a click away from its destination. Before our phones became mobile, we could only transmit voice. Soon phones became mobile and we had 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G. Each generation of mobile network brought more capabilities. The most notable is speed - by speed I mean, internet speed. Handheld systems became ubiquitous and smaller too.
Faster data rates meant richer applications and better user experience. Until 4G, advanced mobile cloud gaming was just a myth. Due to slow data rates, web pages took long to load in browsers. To improve user experience, developers cached some resources to reduce latency during second request.
The connected world is here
Ericsson forecasts about 5 billion cellular connections by the year 2025. Cloud-based AI, critical IoT, cognitive IoT, and advanced mobile cloud gaming are some of the use cases that requires a robust network with ultra low latency, high bandwidth and high speed connectivity and that's where 5G comes in.
The fifth generation of cellular network with connectivity speeds that is up to 100 times faster than the speed of 4G, ultra-low latency and greater bandwidth, 5G is enabling new technologies and redefining our everyday experiences. 5G is making the impossible possible - network of systems collaborating with each other, machines and humans collaborating, it couldn't be any better.
Infrastructure for 5G core network
A good infrastructure is critical to system performance. A system with bad infrastructure is like a car with a bad engine. For a system to perform at its optimum, it is critical that the underlying infrastructure meets the requirement of the applications that runs on top of it. We don't architect system infrastructure and then later struggle to squeeze the applications into it thereby undermining the application performance - no! We are system architects, we don't do that.
System infrastructure refers to the underlying hardware [CPU, RAM, SSD, NIC], software, and networking components, it may be physical or virtual that support the operation of a system.
By bad infrastructure, I mean a system with poor resource dimension. This is quite different from the system architecture itself. Infrastructures are designed for applications so it's important we understand how they behave.
We design systems to perform efficiently but one thing some system architects forget is that optimum performance is expensive. They design systems and when the system is up, bills starts pilling up, they start looking for ways to cut down the costs. It's bad approach.
It's important we keep cost in mind during design phase especially if the infrastructure is in the public cloud. A well designed infrastructure should be able to respond to changes happening at the application layer due to increase in user traffic.
5G core is built on microservices. Microservices are loosely coupled, which makes them easy to package in containers, and easy to scale independently. The network is able to heal itself even before we know something went wrong. Deploying 5G core on cloud native infrastructure makes scaling, resource allocation and upgrade a piece of cake. Baremetal offers better performance compared to virtual machines.
By using baremetal infrastructure, latency is reduced with minimal efforts. If virtual machines were used, extra hops for packets are introduced. Packets would move from the physical interface cards to a virtual switch which are then routed to the virtual machines that host the workloads, SRIOV comes handy in this case but the performance is still better on baremetal. Kubernetes makes the orchestration of the microservices easy. During design, it's good to keep system upgrades in mind. The design should allow seamless upgrades.
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