Why telcos should move from cloud to cloud native
Two friends are camping in the woods when they see a bear running toward them. As one of the friends starts lacing up his running shoes, his shocked partner asks him how on earth he plans to outrun the bear.
His response? “I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I only have to run faster than you.”
In many ways, this little story reflects our current age of disruption in the world of a telco.
Cloud technology is being adopted by telecom operators across the world, primarily driven by the move to virtualize mobile core networks in response to data traffic growth and in preparation for the roll-out of 5G networks. However, despite a surge in deployments, many operators are increasingly frustrated by the results.
With disruption imminent and giant webscalers at every doorstep of content service providers (CSP), there will be those who get eaten and those who emerge victoriously. The difference will be between who laces up their running shoes first, or who adapts to cloud-native the fastest.?
What is cloud computing? Cloud basics explained:?
What is the cloud and how, exactly, is cloud implemented? implemented in the communication industry.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of Cloud reads: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”
Now try saying that in a single breath!
That’s quite a mouthful. But cloud technology isn’t all that new. Delivering computing as a?service, in which users pay for shared resources based on their usage, has been around for ages, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago?that CSPs started to embrace cloud technology.
We define telco cloud as the deployment of virtualized and programmable telecoms infrastructure. This can include Network Function Virtualization (NVF), Software Defined Networking (SDN), artificial intelligence (AI), automation,?distributed cloud computing, and more. Cloud-native is being adopted by telecoms operators across the world – primarily driven by the move to virtualize mobile core networks in response to data traffic growth, and in preparation for roll-out of 5G networks.
The major benefits for telco cloud implementation are:
The challenges with telco cloud
Today, CSPs’ clouds are mostly private (they own it) and mostly central (in only a very few places).?
The original goals for cloud were to decouple growth from cost, and rapidly deliver new services.?
领英推荐
They have done this in the 4G core, IMS/VoLTE, end-of-life replacement, and increasingly for Cloud RAN.?
Solutions to date are far from open and vendor-neutral. The ability to monitor, optimize and modify
systems are not ubiquitous. Performance has been acceptable, but nothing to write home about, and not yet proven at mass scale. Examples of truly innovative services built on telco cloud platforms are few and far between.
In addition, the initial telco cloud mostly ported big network elements into big virtualized network functions (VNF). These are too big, consume too many cloud infrastructure resources, and use legacy operations. They’re unwieldy to deploy, scale, upgrade and maintain.?
Many of the legacy operations are manual. They simply aren’t fast enough to deal with the hundredfold increase in operational activities that come with cloud and 5G’s many devices, services, and slicing.?
It’s complex cloud architecture to manage. After doing all that setup, actions such as integrating and upgrading simply take too much time and effort.??
In addition, traditional VNF-based cloud architecture had no standard procedures to develop and benchmark VNFs, which led to a lack of architectural guidelines and no standard protocols or configuration policies for VNF across vendors. As a result, manual efforts are needed each time to configure, update and test VNFs.?This is one of the roadblocks for service providers to realize the NFV implementation success.
There are additional challenges related to NVFs. Like consumption of hardware resources by VNF (to be highly available) is on the higher side, multi-tenancy is not supported, VNFs cannot be reused or shared, APIs are not provided for automating tasks like scaling, configuring, patching, and updating versions.
Cloud native benefits
For 5G, service providers need more from the cloud. Cloud must be re-architected to cloud-native architecture so they can get breakthrough business agility in rapidly onboarding new apps and deploying and operating new services. The scale of 5G brings many more devices and a very diverse mix of services.?Legacy operations won’t be able to keep up. They need much more automation, especially for slicing. 5G also brings new performance demands, so the cloud needs to move towards the edge for the sake of low-latency, localized reliability, and traffic steering; for that, CSPs need cloud native’s efficiency.?
?Cloud-native migration is a journey. Like most journeys, the hardest part is often taking those first few steps.
Great technology is a start, but CSPs need more than that to deliver sustainable business value – they need to balance technology and people. By embedding the right business processes and workflows within their day-to-day operations, they’ll be able to flawlessly execute their cloud strategy, achieve their business objectives and get it right from the start.
For more information on Nokia cloud-native technology check out our website