Steps to a 5G Ready Cloud – Part 2 – Enable Scaling

5G, in the future, has the potential to offer enhanced mobile broadband and enable a huge volume of the machine to machine communications, based on its ultra-reliable and low latency network. It is no doubt a transformative force to look forward to. But how to make sure you are ready for it? The essential 5-step process is: Prepare the organization for a change, create standalone virtualized network functions, enable scaling, enable full-service automation, and become digitally agile.

Enable scaling

Agility and scalability are the two main reasons reason the CoSP cloud is such a powerful platform for network services including 5G. After deploying standalone VNFs (Virtual Network Functions), the next step in getting ready for a 5G cloud is to enable real-time network reconfiguration, so that VNFs can be provisioned in response to demand.

VNF descriptors are used by VNF vendors with a common information model to articulate the resources the VNFs require and their SLAs (Service Level Agreement). Also used is a common information model for the capabilities and characteristics of the underlying infrastructure. It’s possible to use vendor-neutral orchestration to place workloads where they will run better, matching VNF requirements to the infrastructure characteristics by standardizing the way the VNF requirements and resources are described.

Platform telemetry can be used to sense oversubscription of shared resources to enable load balancing as network traffic and control traffic are highly parallelizable workloads. Addition of more general purpose hardware and VNF software licenses can increase the total network capacity.

Analytics are used to review the past and to better predict the future when auto-scaling is implemented. It becomes possible to plan capacity and right size the network and the data centre, in line with business requirements.