With the proliferation of 5G, vRAN and related technologies, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are seeking new avenues to offer edge and managed services to enterprises efficiently and at scale. As a corollary, CSPs need easy migration paths for their corporate IT and network applications to public clouds that support the necessary scaling and performance requirements for these new services. The existing landscape for many CSPs is, however, complex and disparate: their applications currently run across various platforms—monolithic, virtualized, or bare metal—with varying degrees of automation and orchestration. One of the most pressing needs for CSPs, then, is to consolidate these discrete platforms, improve automation and leverage public cloud elastic scalability where required.
This industry-wide demand offers new opportunities for CSPs, but, as Figure 1 illustrates below, also exposes them to an exponential increase in complexity of their operations that will have an important impact on the cost of managing their network. It is no wonder, then, why these complex multi-cloud operations are propelling CSPs to adopt centralized, cloud-native platforms that visualize and orchestrate their multi-cloud workloads. The network operation center (NOC) of the future must enable consistent operations and continuous real-time synchronization of information, ensuring accurate views on global inventories, resources availability, security, and performance across all clouds. From the core to the edge to the RAN, across any cloud, from on-prem to the public cloud, the NOC should enable an operator to easily visualize the infrastructure, customize and manage it accordingly.
Many CSPs are on a quest to create 5G, cloud-native and open vRAN networks. Essential to their journey to construct such network, CSPs are working with VMware to centralize, manage and organize their distributed telco cloud, public and private cloud environments. Utilizing VMware’s Telco Cloud platform and VMware’s Telco Cloud Automation as an orchestrator, these CSPs can build their 5G network and provide a consistent customer experience.
How Does it Work?
VMware’s Telco Cloud Automation enables CSPs to take full advantage of their multi-cloud ecosystem, distributing workloads among multiple clouds but viewing and managing them in a single, centralized location. Per Figure 2 below, the multi-cloud implementation can be through VMware Cloud where it uses VMware infrastructure over hyperscaler hardware, or it can integrate directly over the hyperscaler upstream Kubernetes distribution for containerized network functions.
As part of the network function instantiation process, CSPs can assign clouds—as requested and intended by the application— in similar or different locations and distribute network functions accordingly.
As the demo below demonstrates, Telco Cloud Automation expands its multi-cloud capabilities to support Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), bringing unified management of workloads on-premise and on hyperscalers’ infrastructures. In the example below, we outline a simple three-step process for deploying a CNF over Amazon EKS—an important feature in Telco Cloud Automation and an easy path to realizing multi-cloud automation across Kubernetes distributions:
- Creation of a Kubernetes cluster in Amazon EKS;
- Registration of the cluster with Telco Cloud Automation; and
- Deployment of a Network Function (CNF) on the Amazon EKS cluster.
In short, Telco Cloud Automation eases access to clusters and consolidates the management of cloud-native workloads on Amazon EKS and VMware Tanzu using Telco Cloud Automation.
Benefits
Telco Cloud Automation is designed to provide a single pane of glass for multi-cloud operations—offering operational consistency, easing workload instantiation, and promoting mobility from the network core to edge to RAN, and from private to public clouds. VMware constructed this platform to address a set of important considerations—from availability and resiliency, to scalability, manageability and security.
For CSPs’ multi-cloud strategy, VMware’s Telco Cloud platform offers the necessary support and capabilities to facilitate this important network evolution. VMware’s Telco Cloud platform not only catalyzes network function onboarding across clouds through its centralized management, but it also gives CSPs the necessary operational insight into cloud and network function usage—visibility they can leverage to inform business decisions. To support next-generation services grounded in 5G and vRAN, a multi-cloud network might be an option to consider—VMware’s Telco Cloud platform with Telco Cloud Automation serves as that all-important bridge to a successful multi-cloud network.
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