How Telcos Can Take Advantage of the Edge Computing – Decoded

In India, there is a growing demand for a distributed cloud approach known as Edge Cloud and an opportunity for telecommunications service providers to collaborate with enterprises to monetize it. In a world that is high on digital transformation, telcos are in a position to help businesses deploy and manage apps in a fast and secure way across thousands of locations—at both the telco and enterprise edges. To achieve this, they'll need a flexible and scalable solution that can manage apps across different cloud infrastructures with a limited computing resource. In the COVID-19 pandemic situation, edge data centers and edge computing play an important role for organizations worldwide. Some of the technologies such as edge computing, IoT, and 5G are making it possible for the organization to tackle COVID-19 related challenges and customer expectations.?

In fact, according to IDC's COVID-19 impact on IT Spending Survey, the India cloud market will see a visible impact in both the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios in terms of increased adoption, with public cloud is at the forefront of all infrastructure-related investments, where the demand for Edge Cloud originated. Enterprise IT has for years adopted and moved critical workloads to the public cloud due to operational and management advantages over on-premises infrastructure. Furthermore, an increasing number of applications rely on real-time latency. The business drivers for these include consumer behavior, such as ride-sharing adoption in India and enterprises improving their operations or monetizing better customer experiences.

Developing a competitive advantage

Although many other players are vying for the enterprise edge market, telcos have a distinct advantage. They already have widely dispersed physical assets, like base stations, central offices, and even street-level cabinets, that may be used to build an edge network. Thus, creating a convenient one-stop-shop for businesses is feasible by combining edge computing with the necessary connectivity. With the growing consumption of video content and the surge in mobile internet services, consumers today are demanding ultra-high-speed, low-latency, and seamless digital experience on the go. The delivery of such an experience is only possible if the compute power of networks resides as close to the consumer as possible. Therefore, distributed Edge computing is critical to ensure a high-performing and secured digital experience.

Edge compute configuration and control

In addition to networking and security, cloud-native technologies such as microservices, containers, and Kubernetes are critical. The Kubernetes architecture, which is extensively used in the IT world, allows an app's component microservices—packed inside a container—to dynamically relocate to any appropriate computing location using a Kubernetes stack. This could be a public cloud or a physical server the enterprise owns, or a virtual machine in a telco’s point of presence.

However, deploying Kubernetes across a highly distributed edge architecture can be challenging, especially given the skill shortage in this field. Whereas deploying an app in a public cloud is simple, deploying an app in potentially hundreds or thousands of locations and then keeping it up to date and secure is a completely different story would necessitate sophisticated operational tooling. Manually connecting application logic, delivery, and security technologies across these environments could introduce new security risks as well as significant operational complexity. To complicate matters further, the edge means different things to different people. Some vendors' access to the edge is restricted to the computing environments that they support. Enterprises, on the other hand, want to define the edge for themselves and deploy their apps where they see fit.

The Power of Volterra

F5 acquired Volterra in January 2021 to assist telcos and enterprises in addressing these challenges. F5 now has a platform that can be used to quickly deploy and securely interconnect apps across an unlimited number of edge locations, whether they are in the public or private cloud, or are on-premises. Furthermore, as Volterra leverages industry-standard container technology and Kubernetes, enterprises and telcos can ‘build once, deploy globally,' rather than rewriting code to adapt to the constraints of a closed edge provider. Volterra's technology is also an excellent platform to deploy F5's enterprise-grade application delivery and security suite to edge locations. As a case in point, F5’s Volterra technology could, for example, enable a telco to deploy and configure apps across hundreds, or even thousands, of stores on behalf of a retailer. Here, the Volterra console can be used to deploy the front-end of the application in the stores. Telcos could then deploy the back-end of the application in the retailer’s private data centers.?The telco can then provide app services, such as load balancing, web app firewall, DDoS, and API security.

Unlike other solutions in the market that originate from the centralized cloud model, the Volterra platform is lightweight and has a small footprint. As the deployment and configuration are almost effortless, employing the F5-Volterra solution will be an order of magnitude more cost-effective than trying to build it in-house or working with the more rigid and computer-intensive solutions provided by the hyper-scalers.

Creating a telecommunications cloud

Approximately 10% of enterprise data is created and processed outside of a traditional centralised data centre or cloud. Gartner predicts that by 2025, this figure will have risen to 75%.With the introduction of 5G networks and the mainstreaming of IoT, this trend of Edge network deployment in data centers will gain traction. This does not, however, mark the end of the hyper scale data center era, since these facilities will continue to be used for storage, content delivery, and large-scale archiving. Edge-driven systems will coexist with the current data center model. As their 5G networks expand, now, more than ever, is the time for telcos to build out a compelling edge proposition.

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