Workflow Hub provides quicker service time-to-market, ease of operability and peace of mind for communication service providers.
The Need for Network Simplification
Communication Service Providers (“CSPs”) find themselves at an inflection point. The pressing need for cost reduction, improved return on network investments, increased operational agility and service time-to-market necessitates a transition from virtual to cloud-native networks. What’s more, macroeconomic factors—from a diaspora of skilled engineering labor to a proliferation of 5G enterprise use cases—presents new urgency for network transition from the CSPs’ perspective. This immediacy to evolve, however, offers a foundational challenge as cloud-native networks present new complexities along with their promises. In today’s world—one revolving around containers, hybrid cloud deployments, ballooning edge networks and an appetite to innovate on new 5G services—there exists a fundamental tension between leveraging these new technologies to ultimately reduce network complexities, costs and drive new revenues and potentially drowning in additional complexities and costs that accompany these same solutions. In short, a method to extract the benefits of 5G technologies while controlling their associated operational and financial drawbacks proves essential.
IDC Research, a market intelligence and research firm, agrees that for 5G deployments, “[c]omplexity management is the name of the game.”1 CSPs able to “manage network and operations complexity will be strongly positioned to capture value in a host of industry verticals, within a value chain in which other providers, including hyperscalers, systems integrators, and value-added resellers will also be competing.”2 In order to tame the complexity associated with deploying a 5G cell site or managing cloud-native network functions across clouds, “operations functions will rely even more heavily on network automation and extensive data analysis.”3
Take, for instance, the operational and financial burden in scaling a 5G network. It is no secret that when constructing a cellular network, a series of regulatory requirements exist that compel CSPs to deploy cell sites with deliberate speed. In addition to governmental impetuses, inherent market competition simply demands rapid scale—each day without coverage in a specific area results in substantial opportunity costs like lost subscriber and enterprise services revenues and, of course, the possibility that a competing CSP can establish itself first as an incumbent. Coordinating the deployment and management of thousands of cell sites demands both skilled operational expertise and a robust network automation platform that can execute, repeat, scale and manage the processes that developers invent. It’s no surprise that “[d]eveloper participation and innovation is a vital component of 5G monetization,” but with rapidly-expanding networks, resources to acquire new skilled developers can prove limiting and, as such, “developing a pathway for nonnetwork developers to take and bundle network capabilities to develop meaningful business outcomes is a crucial step.”4 What’s needed then is not only a strong automation and orchestration platform for cloud-native workloads, but one that’s “developer-friendly low-code/no-code [that] embrace[s] the developer community as it evolves.”5
Workflow Hub for VMware Telco Cloud Automation
With these industry imperatives and operational concerns in mind, we created Workflow Hub for VMware Telco Cloud Automation (“Workflow Hub”). Workflow Hub represents an important evolution in VMware Telco Cloud Automation—our network automation, management and orchestration platform for CSPs—as it weaves a low-code orchestrator into the VMware Telco Cloud Automation platform. As depicted in Figure 1 below, VMware Telco Cloud Automation supports multiple abstraction layers (i.e., automation modules) on top of our customers’ virtualized infrastructure. From network function (both virtualized and cloud-native), Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, network service and network slicing management, to cross-domain, multi-cloud orchestration, VMware Telco Cloud Automation supports Day 0 – Day 2 operational requirements—opening clear pathways for CSPs to reduce operating costs, improve service time-to-market and discover new revenue opportunities. Now, with the forthcoming Workflow Hub (highlighted in green in Figure 1), we’re adding an additional abstraction layer that unifies and coalesces not only the existing automation modules, but also extends to other VMware telco cloud products (like VMware Bare Metal Automation and VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance for bare metal server provisioning and holistic network monitoring and assurance, respectively).
Figure 1 – How Workflow Hub fits into the overall VMware Telco Cloud Automation offering across clouds and domains.
In short, Workflow Hub serves as an umbrella orchestrator that allows a network operator to easily leverage the myriad components of VMware Telco Cloud Automation, other VMware telco cloud products and third-party tools to create multi-cloud workflows that address specific use cases. Figure 2 below offers a detailed glimpse of Workflow Hub and its integrations to other products in one simple pipeline.
Figure 2 – A detailed view of Workflow Hub’s pipeline, its various extensions and integrations.
How does Workflow Hub Reduce Complexity and Support Developers’ Peace of Mind?
Let’s revisit our above example on the effort to provision and deploy a new cell site—a foundational aspect of scaling a network. Often when scaling a network, time-to-deploy constitutes an important KPI for CSPs and so ensuring that site provisioning processes are correctly established and then made repeatable is a prerequisite to scale efficiently. It’s important, moreover, that this development is centralized—whatever provisioning process that’s created needs to be shared across the network so that an operator can, for instance, schedule multiple deployments in parallel for added scale and trust that, if the process is repeated, its outcome will appear consistently across cell sites. Ultimately, this centralized development process (also referred to as “process automation”), improves scale, reliability, reduces errors through automated repeatability and requires less hands-on intervention—freeing time and resources and driving quicker services time-to-market. Below we demonstrate how a network operator can easily provision and scale cell sites using process automation with Workflow Hub’s simple GUI.
First, our operator opens the Workflow Hub tab in the corresponding VMware Telco Cloud Automation environment and creates a new workflow. In this example, as our operator is deploying a cell site (and creating a one-time process to ensure repeatability and scalability), the operator names this workflow “Site-Deployment-Workflow,” as depicted in Figure 3 below:
Figure 3 – Creating and naming our workflow for cell site deployment.
Our operator can now select among pre-built “building blocks” to assemble the proper workflow. The pre-built building blocks are intentionally designed to satisfy an array of network requirements and fit disparate environments—providing easy off-the-shelf functionality, streamlining workflow deployment and reducing corresponding operating expenses.
If the operator wishes to modify the pre-built building blocks and implement changes to the workflow’s construction and execution, however, Workflow Hub enables that, too. Our operator can build completely different workflows or building blocks with the domain-specific language VMware provides—ensuring that the operator can maintain flexibility and customizability at any stage of workflow creation and execution. Similarly, if the operator wishes to outsource the customizing process, VMware’s professional services organization can customize the workflow on the operator’s behalf with ease—offering highly-specified, advanced customizations for particularly complex workflows and use cases. Knowing that our customers will inevitably have these diverse requirements and might wish to construct their own building blocks, we invented Workflow Hub with considerations like improved service time-to-market, flexibility, customizability and ease of operability in mind.
In this example here, as illustrated in Figure 4 below, the operator will choose among VMware-provided building blocks or from a number of third-party templates like Ansible, Terraform and GitLab. Workflow Hub’s time savings are not only attributable to the ease of operability through the drag-and-drop GUI and pre-built building blocks, but its API-driven integration with customers’ end-to-end CI/CD pipelines and extensibility to third-party testing solutions accelerates service time-to-market. If an operator wishes to provide, for instance, an Ansible playbook, Workflow Hub can ingest the playbook, execute its scripts and gather the results. What’s more, the extensions we see in Figure 4 below can be applied at any step of the workflow creation process (e.g., custom pre/post validation, vendor-provided test sets, performance tests, protocol test packages, security tests, etc.).
Figure 4 – Pre-built “building blocks” allow an operator to quickly assemble necessary components to create a workflow.
In our example here, as highlighted in Figure 5 below, the operator chooses among VMware-provided templates and, in a simple drag-and-drop GUI, can quickly piece together a workflow to provision and deploy a new cell site and instantiate the required CNFs. It’s important to note too that Workflow Hub’s library of building blocks is independent of its engine—as such, new workflows can be delivered outside of VMware Telco Cloud Automation’s release cadence—equipping operators with new, innovative workflows on-demand.
Figure 5 – A simple drag-and-drop interface allows for streamlined workflow creation.
If the operator desires more information, a simple click-in to the building block reveals the sub-components inherent to each building block. Here, in Figure 6 below, we see the processes required for server imaging.
Figure 6 – Each building block’s sub-components can be revealed with a simple click.
The operator can also choose to audit the code underlying each building block—ensuring that each component of the building block executes the desired commands.
Figure 7 – Behind each building block, an operator has transparency into the underlying code.
Now, once the desired building blocks are assembled, the operator can run each step and monitor its progress—as well as the state of other workflows—either directly through the Workflow Hub GUI or via a direct integration with VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance for detailed metrics about each workflow.
Figure 8 – All of the steps comprising a workflow are condensed in a table for easy status monitoring. An operator can also use VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance for detailed workflow metrics and advanced monitoring.
Importantly, the workflow’s settings can then be modified to automate the workflow’s execution on an ongoing basis.
Figure 9 – Each workflow has settings for ongoing monitoring and execution.
Use Cases and Initial Conclusions
Of course, the cell site deployment use case depicted above constitutes one of several for Workflow Hub. Below, we’ve identified additional use cases (a non-exhaustive list, of course) that span across domains—from building one’s RAN to expediting processes at the Core:
- An operator wants to construct an executable and repeatable workflow to provision a whole cell site in a few hours in an automated fashion, including CNFs (this is the use case we illustrated above);
- An operator wants to create a pipeline to be used by application teams, that brings up a Kubernetes cluster for a new network function version testing, procure the results and terminate the environment;
- An operator wants to link the onboarding steps not covered by VMware Telco Cloud Automation (e.g., setting up external networks, etc.) with the network function deployment;
- An operator wants to automatically link several steps to manage the different components of infrastructure (SDDC) (e.g., BM provisioning, VIM LCM);
- An operator wants to save a predefined workflow as a code so that the operations team can execute and repeat it later when customizing it to fit the actual environment.
Whatever use case an operator chooses for Workflow Hub, the underlying benefits are clear: Workflow Hub enables easily-defined and repeatable workflow creation and execution that are less error-prone and require less manual intervention—resulting, importantly, in time and operating expense savings for the CSP. Over subsequent months, we’ll be releasing the results of additional testing to show specific time and financial savings across a swath of use cases.
What’s clear, though, is Workflow Hub will provide peace of mind for network operators, streamline workflow creation and automate away their ongoing execution—promoting repeatability, scale and enabling operators to focus outwardly on creating revenue-generating services instead of on the often error-prone manual processes to run one’s network. In the face of an increasingly complex multi-cloud world, CSPs can find solace in Workflow Hub.
1 John Byrne, Worldwide Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization Solution Forecast, 2023-2027, IDC, May 2023: p. 4.
2 John Byrne, Worldwide Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization Solution Forecast, 2023-2027, IDC, May 2023: p. 4.
3 John Byrne, Worldwide Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization Solution Forecast, 2023-2027, IDC, May 2023: p. 9.
4 John Byrne, Worldwide Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization Solution Forecast, 2023-2027, IDC, May 2023: p. 4.
5 John Byrne, Worldwide Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization Solution Forecast, 2023-2027, IDC, May 2023: p. 4.
