Telco Cloud Transformation | Demystifying the Roadmap: Assurance, Orchestration and Automation

Market Dynamics, Estimates, and Drivers

Number of 5G subscribers will be upto ~1 billion by end of FY2022 -23 | 5G subscription uptake is faster than 4G. By 2027, 5G subscriptions are expected to reach 4.4 billion. | Source: Ericsson Mobility Report

5G economic value will range between $5-7 trillion by 2030 | 5G set to generate upto $5-7tn worth of economic value in 2030. To get the maximum cut of this pie telcos need to move beyond connectivity to managed solutions. | Source: InterDigital & ABI Research Report

Workloads on cloud enviornment will increase to 580 million by 2024 | VMware estimates 580 million modern workloads by 2024 are expected to run on diverse, distributed environments spanning public cloud, on-premises, edge, telco clouds and hosted clouds. | Source: VMware

Workloads on cloud-native platforms will increase upto 95% by 2025 | Gartner estimates that by 2025, over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. As more organizations move their critical workloads into the cloud, it introduces new risks.Source: Gartner

5G Ecosystem & Business Model – 5G is creating a burgeoning ecosystem of app makers, service integrators, platform developers and others who are rushing to fill the voids they recognize. 5G’s potential has no limit and the telecom industry must seize this opportunity to redefine its business model to monetize 5G. 

Connectivity to Managed Solutions – Telcos need to emerge from basic connectivity service provider to differentiated dervice provider & evolve toward ‘Managed Solutions’ provider to tap the horizontal industry 4.0 market segments.

Challenge

Migration path from Telco’s to Techco’s through Cloud & Edge Computing by over-coming the inertia

Telco 5G network & IT teams are under pressure to deliver applications and services faster, out-maneuver competitors, and provide exceptional user experiences while facing tighter budgets and a severe lack of cloud specialist skills. While the move to cloud-native network operations is relatively new for operators, it’s old hat for enterprises and web/hyper-scalers. The technology works so optimally that leveraging cloud investments for efficiency and revenue generation is much more about strategic organizational changes.

As we moved into the cloud and embraced this transition to the cloud, one of the biggest changes we dealt with was a change in how teams were structured and the team’s skillset. Telcos are in a transition stage they need the expertise of the SMEs who are coming from a typical telecom domain but also need to understand cloud technology, and how to run the IT workloads, rather than the bare-metal or the legacy applications.

In terms of private or public cloud, it is best for the telcos to build, optimize and leverage their own telco-grade private/hybrid cloud for both core and RAN workloads. Telcos have arrangements with the big three — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud on various mobile edge computing-related initiatives on public, private, and open-hybrid cloud. The move to cloud-native and container-based virtualized architecture has led to more flexibility, faster delivery of services, greater scalability, and significant cost efficiency.

Introduction to cloudification

It’s about culture, i.e., managing containerized livestock to graze across the pathway, not cuddling proprietary pets.

A Telco Cloud is not an enterprise cloud nor a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). It needs a real-time environment to support mission-critical low latency workloads/business applications for agile response to meet dynamic customer demands with predictive analytical insights of the network to reduce time to market solutions & services with High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) resiliency attributes.

Telco cloud network means that workloads are now moved away from proprietary implementation to complete network function software components. These software components run with the beauty of what is called microservices for software and run with the elegance of things that the cloud inherently supports, like capacity management, auto-elasticity, scale in, and scale out.

Cloud computing frees you from the expense and overhead of managing your own hardware, making it possible for you to build resilient, flexible, scalable distributed systems.

DevOps (CI/CD) Continuous Integration/ Continuous deployment is about closing the feedback loop between those who write the code and those who use it.

Containers deploy and run software in small, standardized, self-contained units, making it easier to build large, diverse, and distributed systems.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source distributed operating system for container orchestration, i.e., for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Cloud-Native is about cloud-based, containerized, distributed systems made up of cooperating microservices, dynamically managed by automated infrastructure as code.

Cloud-Native Architecture: an approach to build and run scalable applications in modern, agile environments on public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, Microservices (MSA), immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs substantiate this architectural framework.

Cloud Native Function (CNF) is a network function deployed to run on containers, inheriting cloud-native principles, including K8s lifecycle management, observability & agility.

Adoption of cloud-native networks

Accelerate adoption of autonomous and insight-driven Cloud Native 5G networks

Telco’s need to make an operational shift from vertical silos to horizontal layers. The price of not migrating goes beyond the cost of continued system maintenance and hardware replacement. Scaling is the power.

The first revolution is the cloudification, the second is the dawn of DevOps/DevSecOps (CI/D), that involves and how it’s changing operations. The third revolution is containerization. Together, these three waves of change are creating a new software world: the cloud-native world. The operating system/engine for this world is called Kubernetes.

The entire 5G core network plus the control plane, subscriber management, automation, orchestration, and OSS/BSS network functions are well suited for virtualization, and even cloud-native (CN) virtualization. The CU can be partial cloud-native or VNF and & DU can be deployed as a VNF/CNF but with the notable exception the Radio Unit (RU) functions of 5G RAN.

The 5G core’s service-based architecture provides a cloud-native foundation for operators to deploy new services and scale them as needed. It’s the same functional design that’s enabled hyper-scalers to build public clouds to serve the globe.

Key strategies for cloudification / telco application workload cloud migration

Adapted from 6 Application Migration Strategies: “The 6 R’s” by Stephen Orban

Refactor/re-Architect with cloud-native features – Key metrics include – costly, long-run time & effort, fully cloud native, e.g AWS ECS / S3ObjectStore / DynamodB / S3 Glacier) 

Re-platform: Just containerize the application – Key metrics include – cost effective, partial cloud native e.g AWS EKS

Re-host: Lift & Shift – Key metrics include – cost effective, less scalability, e.g AWS EC2 instances

Re-purchase – Key metrics include – low investment, pay as use, SaaS product like BI tools, reporting tools, e.g. AWS Connect / Simple Email Service

Retain – Key metrics include – no migration, no additional cost impact, maintain the status quo

Retire – Key metrics include – De-commission, remove application

Service assurance

Cloud economy and architecture generates new opportunities by delivering the next generation applications & services with economies of scale. Telcos are on a journey to a new operational paradigm, one that focuses on business intent and demands continuous assurance across multiple domains and vendors. They need to find the right balance by creating environments that allow VNFs and CNFs to be aligned and operate, even while functioning on an increasingly distributed hybrid cloud network.

Guiding principles for Telco – Six principles that should guide telcos as they journey towards cloud-native service assurance operations:

• Choices – Cloud-native apps should be infrastructure-independent, to align with new cloud technologies as necessary
• Decomposition – Comprising modular and reusable software components
• Resiliency – Responding to problems without service interruption
• State optimization – Separation of application logic and data
• Orchestration and automation – Emphasizing zero-touch networking principles
• Openness, or the ability for software apps and components to be modular and easily replaceable as necessary

Service Assurance Metrics

• Holistically monitor & manage
• Automate root cause analysis (RCA)
• Trigger closed loop actions
• Prioritize issues
• Manage multiple tenants
• Drive SLA management

Secured Service Assurance

Security and compliance are considered shared responsibilities when using a managed service like AKS/EKS/GKE for K8s service management. E2E Assurance should include the following:

• Assurance aspects: Device, customer, services, and network
• Assurance domains: Automation (CI/CD, DevSecOps) & Intelligence (AIOps)
• Assurance layer: above the physical network function, virtual network function or IoT infrastructure

Orchestration

Transition from on-premises proprietary cuddled deployment to bespoke harmonized containerized workloads grazing on the pathway, thereby orchestrate network and business processes with an eye toward agility, innovation and transformation.

The evolution toward cloud-based, virtualized, disaggregated, and open networks introduce exponential complexity to operations. At the same time, the monetization from next-generation networks such as 5G requires delivering services with unprecedented performance and reliability.

Orchestration is a foundational concept in the telco cloud, starting with Kubernetes. Network and automation, zero-touch plug & play networking, and orchestration are essential to getting cloud services to work at scale. Telco cloud needs to align with IT operations and the same core technology also needs to work in private 5G enterprise deployments, MEC & other customer- specific services.

Instead of having to maintain a sprawling estate of machines of various kinds, architectures, and operating systems, all the telco need to do is run a container orchestrator – Kubernetes. The term Container Orchestrator refers to single service that takes care of ‘Scheduling, Orchestration & Cluster Management’.

• Kubernetes does the things that the very best system administrator would do: automation, failover, centralized logging, monitoring. With DevOps approach and makes it the default, out of the box & is ‘Cloud Provider Agnostic’ thereby making deployment easy.
• Kubernetes as an orchestration engine, has built-in capabilities to ensure that the cluster operates as per the set specifications by monitoring various attributes & taking actions (e.g. POD restart) if deviated from specified period or a value.
• Kubernetes continuously monitors the status of the deployment and takes corrective action to ensure the deployment is operating as specified.
• Kubernetes services concepts like direct pod connections, advertising service IPs, and node ports are techniques you can leverage to expose Kubernetes services outside the cluster.

Cloud Orchestration Services

Cloud Orchestration manages cloud services including software deployment and upgrades, system setup, system administration, monitoring, incident resolution, problem management, configuration and change management, service desk, security management and monitoring, capacity planning, availability management, disaster recovery and routine update of services.

Kubernetes Cluster Management

Customer/Operator managed K8s platform may use the open-source K8s project as a starter or take a 3rd party K8s distribution like Red Hat’s OpenShift or VMWare’s Tanzu and deploy to the public cloud or may make use of a public cloud service provider managed native Kubernetes services were in cloud providers will manage and run the Kubernetes infrastructure and & telcos only need to take care of using Kubernetes to deploy and run your container workloads.

K8s cluster consists of ‘Master Node’ (on the control plane to coordinate the cluster) & ‘Worker Node’ (to run the application or network microservices).

POD: is the smallest deployable object in Kubernetes, which represents a single instance of a running process in a cluster. PODs may contain one or more containers, such as Docker containers. When a Pod runs multiple containers, the containers share the Pod’s resources and are managed as a single entity.

K8s API Server: handles all internal and external calls (traffic), accepts, and controls all the actions, including access to the etcd database. It authenticates and configures data for API objects and services REST operations.

K8s Scheduler: determines which node will host a Pod of containers based on the available resources (such as volumes) to bind, and then tries and retries to deploy the Pod based on availability and success.

ETCD Database: contains the state of the cluster, networking, and other persistent information, such as dynamic encryption keys and secrets, as discussed later in the article.

Master Node: Also known as the control plane, responsible for scaling worker nodes and provisioning new containers.

Worker Node: Includes sub-components like Kubelet, Kube-proxy, container run time

Kubelet: A communication agent that manages all containers in the POD, maintaining worker node health & setting up POD requirements & reporting POD status

Kube-proxy: A networking agent, handles network communication inside & outside the POD to expose set of applications running on POD

Automation

The goal is to deploy and operate zero-touch services from automation to autonomy with agility, scale & cost efficiencies.

Telco cloud automation will manage service lifecycles throughout the network cloud, the hybrid cloud, the edge cloud, and the IT cloud to improve customer experience.

Automation of cloudification CNF infrastructure applies three fundamental principles:

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) – embracing DevOps culture within the orchestration of telco workloads on cloud infrastructure, processes, and network testing. The six steps in DevOps culture include: planning, development, integration, monitoring, feedback, operations for automated workloads/processes.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI-ML/AI Ops) – on real-time operations & optimization to derive actionable insights. The key application is SON (Self Organizing Networks) for network optimization to identify the network anomalies & take predictive action based on the insights derived from the telco data lakes being processed.

Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP): Telco network configuration, provisioning & commissioning of network elements and workload, eliminating the manual intervention.

Cloud-native automations means the design & development of software applications that leverage cloud principles to bring agility, scale & cost efficiencies using containerized infrastructure, micro-service architecture with CI/CD development framework, for launching new services faster i.e. reduced time to market (TTM) with minimum marketable features (MMF) to strategize go-to-market (GTM).

Security

Implementing Security & Observability for Kubernetes – with enforced Governance and Encryption.

Cloud security is a combination of people, procedure & technology designed to address external and internal threats to the network & business. A holistic approach to secure telco cloud – containers and cloud-native applications of Kubernetes clusters & workloads is through Security & Observability strategy.

Security and Observability for cloud-native platforms for open virtual RAN and beyond consists of three parts – Cloudify, Containerize, and Orchestrate. The 5G telco cloud, the near and far edge, and RAN disaggregation efforts such as Open RAN all present new risks for network operators to mitigate. 5G core requires telcos to adopt the cybersecurity disciplines and best practices intrinsic to industrial and enterprise cloud IT management. inating the manual intervention.

Key cloud security strategic mindset:

• Adopt cloud security platform: Employ data security principles and operationalize EKM (Encryption Key Management), called crypto-operations.
• Ensure the platform supports cloud-native integration across multi-clouds with data security governance compliance.
• Ensure the cloud-native platform provides actionable, prioritized insights for simplified cloud security operations

Food For Thought and Key Take-Aways

Container in Virtual machine (VM) – Container in VM approach is recommended for telcos currently in the ‘evaluation to planning to implementation’ phase of migrating their workloads to cloud.

Automation – Embrace DevSecOps culture (CD/CD), ZTP (Zero Touch Provisioning), AI-Ops (AI based O&M) to eliminate human-made errors and derive actionable insights.

To-Do’s for business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance 

• Avoid cloud lock-in (cloud provider agnostic) by distributing applications and services across multi-cloud, dynamically shifting workloads.
• Avoid cloud bursting – use public clouds to extend capacity for peak demands.
• Avoid non-compliance – Segregate regulatory compliance sensitive workloads & critical applications either on-premises or private cloud.

Quantum computing – Telcos should have a future visionary agenda in their 2030 roadmap to evolve from cloud computing to quantum computing where in through connected Satellites to the cloud of hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure …) they develop the computing capabilities of next generation cutting-edge technology services in Metaverse, Web3.0, 6G arena.