Many telcos have pulled back from building their own telco clouds for IT purposes, and turned to partnerships with public cloud providers, that trend may be reversed when it comes to the highly distributed, high performance cloud and edge infrastructure needed to support 5G vRANs.
Many operators are still wary of putting their RANs in a public cloud, either because they fear performance trade-offs, or they resist being locked into AWS or Google in the same way they are currently locked into their major vendors. Austria’s A1 is one telco that is pursuing development of its own cloud infrastructure and aims to use this to enable new services for enterprise customers, as well as for internal purposes like vRAN. Its digital unit is working to provide Kubernetes-based orchestration as a European alternative to hyperscalers.
A1 Digital will offer the orchestration and automation services for containerized applications based on Kubernetes as a fully integrated service in its Exoscale cloud.
Exoscale SKS (Scalable Kubernetes Service) is designed to make it easier for customers to use containers without significant effort or expertise in a secure environment with a scalable and transparent pricing structure.
“The Exoscale team has proven time and again that they are at the pulse of the new digital revolution. At A1 Digital, we are developing world-class products for our international customer,” said COO Alejandro Plater. “Those cloud enthusiasts have built a solid cloud platform that is powerful, enjoyable to use, and is a European alternative to the incumbent hyperscalers.”
On the other hand, Dish has announced that it will run its 5G vRAN in the Amazon AWS cloud, but other telcos that have entrusted IT functions to hyperscalers are still convinced that they will need specialized infrastructure to support the RAN. And when that infrastructure is built mainly at the edge, telcos may be better placed than hyperscalers to access the right locations, to manage a highly distributed set of assets, and to monetize the resulting souped-up cloud by using it to support enhanced consumer and enterprise services.
AWS – which needs telco cooperation to extend its edge services quickly without building out every location itself – insists it has no desire to compete with operators. David Brown, VP of the cloud giant’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) unit, told SDxCentral:
“While other cloud providers have decided to do acquisitions in the space of telco, we’ve actually not done that specifically because we see a lot of value in partnering with existing independent software vendors (ISVs) in the space.”
He says AWS has been working with “the Ericssons, the Nokias, the Mavenirs, the Altiostars, Samsung, pretty much anybody in the space” to port their software to AWS, but it does not want to acquire its own 5G software provider or bypass telcos. Instead, it aims to be indispensable to their future networks, as it has proved with Dish. “In the case of Open RAN, the fact that there are very well-defined APIs gives us a lot of opportunity for deeper integration, and so whether that’s running on an Outpost down at a cell site, or all the way up through the RAN, we’re able to do it pretty well,” Brown said.
Outposts, which are AWS’s edge nodes, will – in the case of Dish – support RAN sites with 1U-sized edge units that run on Amazon’s own Graviton2 processor.
“When you put an Outpost in a cell site, you can manage that Outpost as if it was in an AWS data center, so your development team can actually write some software and deploy that to that remote location or 10,000 remote locations in exactly the same way as if it was all running within a region,” Brown explained, who claims Graviton2 would reduce the cost of running a vRAN by 40% compared to an x86-based platform, at half the power consumption.
“We’re managing virtually from the infrastructure layer all the way up, as opposed to other frameworks like the [Google Cloud] Anthos and the [Microsoft Azure] Arcs of the world, which is really just a layer on top of some infrastructure that the provider has to manage,” he claimed.