Digital transformation and 5G: Pushing cloud to the network edge

Telecom carriers are becoming giant IT organizations, the needs and architectures of telcos and enterprises have been converging as they both engage in deep digital transformation.

Meanwhile, public cloud hyperscalers are starting to spread across networks by extending into telco-based edge compute. Fleeing from the specter of the proverbial dumb pipe, communication service providers (CSPs) are becoming nothing but giant IT and cloud organizations, and that’s a really good thing. Doubling down on their real estate footprint to roll out 5G and edge compute and refreshing their technical expertise with all the buzzwords du jour, they are uniquely positioned to take a very sizeable bite of the digital transformation apple.

Inside the CSPs, everything is taking a turn toward the cloud. It started with the cloudification of service providers’ internal IT infrastructure (SPIT), i.e. remote employees, HR, sales, accounting, etc. Then it moved to the cloudification of their operations support systems and business support systems for operations and billing and now to the cloudification of NetOps, namely allowing more scalable use of analytics and AI/ML.

A more recent trend in this remarkable transformation is in the morphing of the CSPs network fabric itself, ultimately becoming a cloud network where network resources are no longer fixed in space or time. In order to achieve this, telcos have been re-architecting their telco cloud with micro-services, virtual network functions (VNF) now becoming cloud network functions (CNF) and, as a result, increasing the need to assure their performance and to ensure and secure their end-users digital experience. With micro-service calls now going up and down the software stack across a highly distributed geographical footprint, multi-dimensional observability has become a must.

Enterprises are moving deeper into the cloud

There is no doubt that the pandemic has accelerated the enterprises’ transformation and their move to the cloud. With remote workers everywhere, enterprises have had to adapt rapidly and have become more and more distributed in nature.

As a result, any part of their operations that had not been already cloudified was rapidly projected into the hyperscalers’ workloads. In that context, assuring and securing the precious end user’s digital experience has become more important than ever. Therefore, one can now clearly see a convergence of the needs and architectures of telcos and enterprises as they both engage in deep digital transformation.

Giants are spreading their tentacles

In the meantime, public cloud hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) have been systematically partnering with telcos and are starting to spread their cloud tentacles closer to the enterprise end-users by extending their workloads into telco-based edge compute nodes. This landscape is relatively new for them and they are therefore also in need of observability in this territory.  

This is covered by container-based micro-services observability which can meet the scale of these cloud giants across both centralized and edge cloud environments.

In the midst of all this, full-stack developers are taking a pivotal role in these three types of organizations. They are no longer just the introvert geeks in the corner cubicle; most critical decisions are now either made by them or with them in mind.

This transformation has certainly multiplied the number of personas in the digital landscape for service providers, hyperscalers, and enterprises alike. There is now a need to support the NetOps folks running the networks, the DevOps teams plumbing their applications into the infrastructure in continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CI/CD) mode, the CloudOps teams ensuring all workloads are running smoothly as well as the SecOps teams securing this entire landscape.

In this transformational context, telcos, hyperscalers and enterprise IT teams alike need to:

• Leverage cloud-native technology from the network core all the way to the end-user applications.
• Leverage ML, AI, and Analytics to get actionable insight from the multiple 3rd party data sources data they generate and/or gather across their infrastructure.
• Build security as an integral part of their infrastructure’s DNA.
• Keep a very close eye on the end-user experience (what matters most nowadays).

Now, achieving all this comes with several challenges, such as training and education, integration of Open APIs for every piece of the puzzle, avoiding compute performance bottlenecks, covering all the virtual threat surfaces, all of this while avoiding “sensor creep” (the multiplication of costly and bulky instrumentation across the infrastructure) and without breaking the bank!

As part of such a journey, one can go one of three paths, the first, leveraging proprietary infrastructure vendor-based platforms, the second, using open-source to internally develop your own homegrown independent platform, or thirdly, go with a vendor-agnostic open platform developed by an expert solution provider.  Each of which has pros & cons depending on one’s specific situation such as vendor lock-in avoidance policies, the difficulty in hiring and retaining large volumes of competent development resources, and ensuring worldwide 24/7/365 support for such a platform.

In the end, with this blurring of the lines between telco, cloud and enterprise, who knows if there will eventually be any difference between a Cloudified Network and Edge Compute Operator, a cloud hyperscaler that spreads across networks or a large, cloud-based, highly distributed digital enterprise? One thing remains for sure though, the need to ensure and secure an exceptional end-user digital experience will only increase over time!

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