The increasingly edge-centric nature of 5G networks is a golden opportunity for cloud providers to gain a strategic position in the telecoms market. At the least, this will provide them with new or increased revenues from operators; on top of that, it can even enable them to usurp operators in providing many service elements, especially to enterprises. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have all been courting operators as customers and partners in recent years, and while they have clearly won the battle to build and monetize the centralized cloud, at the edge there is a different balance of power, at least for now. Operators need to build or rent edge cloud infrastructure to support distributed cores and vRANs,…