In the ever-shifting ground of the telecommunications landscape, a critical question keeps popping up among telcos: How can you use new technical capabilities to produce desired business outcomes? That question repeatedly comes to mind, of course, because most telecoms with ambitions to codify and monetize their 5G networks have networks and processes that are constantly in flux as each telco moves toward its own preferred end state in a way that endeavors to meet its business objectives.
Whatever those objectives may be, one thing is clear: The technical capabilities of the telecom network and the platform driving it are irrevocably intertwined with business outcomes. But another question remains, and it’s a bit more ambiguous in our rapidly changing world: How can you build flexibility and agility into your systems to adapt to the different stages along the transition to 5G and the shift to full-on cloud-native approaches to deploying and managing telecommunications networks?
Connecting Fundamental Capabilities to Guiding Principles Driving Business Objectives
The answer, often easier said than done, is to imbue your systems with several fundamental technical capabilities that lay the groundwork for rapidly pursuing your business objectives even in the face of rapid change:
- Flexible infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, so you can easily and cost-effectively pivot during transitions, changes in vendors, or new network elements or VNFs without missing a beat.
- Agile cloud-native technology and containers as a service, or CaaS, to quickly modify and tune your deployments.
- Automation to put deployments and lifecycle management on a conveyor belt to maximize efficiency and minimize operating costs.
- Assurance to ensure it all runs smoothly even while system changes are taking place.
These fundamental technical capabilities are closely connected to guiding principles for system design like flexibility, agility, extensibility, replicability, and scalability so that you can quickly connect — or reconnect — the dots between technical capabilities and your desired business outcomes in cost-effective ways.
The Power of a Single Stack with IaaS and CaaS
So how can infrastructure abstraction, automation, and lifecycle management help you deploy and commercialize 5G services at scale in faster, easier, and more manageable ways?
With VMware Telco Cloud Platform, the answer is simple: The IaaS and CaaS capabilities of the platform enable you to run VNFs and CNFs on a single stack with automated LCM that streamlines operations and reduces OpEx while giving you flexibility and agility to pursue your strategic business objectives.
Potent IaaS capabilities, in particular, are critically important to managing your existing network functions to ensure a stable, performant transition from 4G or a non-stand-alone 5G network to a 5G stand-alone network. Sets of VNFs can be shifted to CNFs at different stages and hosted on the same horizontal platform as the VNFs, which eases the transition, streamlines operations, and minimizes costs.
The Business Value of Automated Lifecycle Management
The technical capabilities of the new release of Telco Cloud Platform establishes concrete links between technical capabilities near-immediate business value, several of which are powered by the Workflow Hub component:
- Reduce OpEx through simplified LCM of the platform for both VNFs and CNFs with the IaaS and CaaS automation capabilities enabled by Workflow Hub, which serves as a flexible CI/CD pipeline for deploying and managing network functions.
- Match the LCM model to your network’s shifting requirements. With Telco Cloud Platform, you gain the flexibility to mix and match approaches to lifecycle management based on your network’s unique requirements: You can use the ETSI approach to LCM for NFV when you want, or you can use an agile, intent-based LCM model driven by GitOps practices.
Minimizing Risks and Costs for CaaS Operations
The new release of Telco Cloud Platform lets you achieve operational consistency for CaaS by reducing the frequency with which you need to upgrade the system, which in turn decreases the risk of degrading network quality.
You can also support multiple versions of Kubernetes on the same platform. As a result, you can work with different network functions with ease and more readily pair the version of Kubernetes with the vendor’s network functions that will best deliver your desired business outcome. In addition, Telco Cloud Platform supports multiple versions of Helm.
The cluster rehoming capability lets you selectively upgrade legacy Kubernetes clusters to the latest Kubernetes version, enabling you to more effectively manage a multi-vendor environment that has different upgrade cadences for the network functions of various vendors.
Workflow Automation Pipeline for IaaS
Automation is critical for controlling the cost and complexity of a 5G network. Integrating a diverse set of automation fragments into an end-to-end process flow empowers you to support new network builds with ease, roll out new services fast, and maintain dependable, cost-efficient operations.
By using pre-built templates as building blocks from its catalog, Workflow Hub lets you quickly and consistently stitch together and automate processes to address various use cases, including those associated with IaaS:
- Create a pipeline that application teams can use to bring up virtual infrastructure or a Kubernetes cluster for network function version testing, obtain the results, and terminate the environment.
- Link deployment steps that take place outside the telecom automation of Telco Cloud Platform, such as setting up an external network, with the deployment of a network function.
- Automatically link several steps to manage the different components of your software-defined data center.
- Save a predefined workflow as code so that an operations team can execute and repeat it later after customizing it to fit its environment while minimizing errors.
- Concurrently implement workflows across various sites for faster and more efficient automation that improves integration readiness.
- Use APIs to integrate your DevOps practices and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools.
- Supply a dashboard for monitoring and troubleshooting end-to-end process automation flows to help understand how they are performing and where issues are occurring.
Benefits of the Horizontal Platform
A single stack for running and managing VNFs and CNFs not only radically simplifies your network architecture, reducing the number of components that need to be managed and secured, but also decreases hardware expenditures and energy costs by improving resource utilization.
So at the same time that a horizontal platform gives you the flexibility, agility, and automation to rapidly deploy and monetize new services, it reduces both OpEx and CapEx. Those savings give you the space, time, and value to focus on what matters most: meeting your business objectives.
To find out more, check out Telco Cloud Platform.
