Realising Telecom OSS/BSS on AWS

Cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google have revolutionised the world we live in by providing the IT infrastructure (virtual) for a lower cost compared to the physical infrastructure. This levelled the IT field, enabled small players to compete with big organisations.

European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI) created a working group for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) which developed requirements and architecture for virtualising various Telecom functions. The vision was to enable small players in the Telecom industry, utilising COTS systems and avoid vendor lock in.

The main players were primed for such a scenario with most of their Functional elements operating on their servers as virtual elements. Key players like HP, Dell, RedHat, VMware were ready to provide the underlying infrastructure.

One of the main idea behind NFV – ‘Realise Amazon economics of running your Data center using COTS’.

Why go for COTS when we can trial out NFV on AWS?

Won't that be cheaper?As part of my AWS learning exercise, I tried to map AWS services onto the Architecture I am familiar with – NFV.

Upon completing my exercise halfway, I realised it is very much possible not just to realise the NFV on AWS but the whole OSS/BSS.

I know, baby steps and major transformation has to be done in stages. Let us first see if we can realise NFV on AWS.

NFV architecture on AWS

One of the important element of NFV is Management & Network Orchestrator (MANO) and it manages the Life cycle of the Virtual infrastructure / Services. It also hosts the Inventory of Virtual resources and the Images repository of the Virtual Network Functions. The MANO orchestrates using Workflows or GUI. It hosts a monitoring function which triggers event-based workflows for Auto-scaling etc.

The Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) manages the overall Virtual resources.

The Telecom Virtual Network Functions (VNF) are the Telecom software that will be instantiated on a Virtual Compute function that may also be connected with a Virtual storage and/or Virtual Network.

The below pictures can explain better on these can be realised on AWS.

Figure 1 - ETSI's NFV Architecture

Figure 2 - Functional description of the Architecture.

Figure 3 - NFV architecture realised inside AWS VPC

It is very much possible to realise the above architecture by using different AWS Services.

I understand there will be many questions on how Service chaining can be realised here? Or is it possible to send the Telco traffic through this?

Let us not rush into conclusions, I believe it is possible to move the non-traffic components of OSS/BSS first to AWS and then slowly start moving the rest.

With VMware supporting the functionality of exporting VMs on to AWS, the Telco VNFs on-boarded on to VMware can be migrated to AWS.

MVNOs will be benefited with this approach as their Capex/Opex required for OSS/BSS will come down drastically.

The data lakes of Telco Operators can be moved to AWS and using Sagemaker AI/ML models can be built and deployed.

With the plethora of services available in AWS, lot of Telco components can be mapped / realised on AWS.

This could be achieved on Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform as well.

Will an Operator be comfortable in moving their Functional elements onto the Public cloud? Only time can tell.