AWS – Powering Telecommunications Architecture Evolution Beyond 5G/Edge
AWS has a multi-faceted presence in the Telco industry, offering both services for the sector, including partner solutions, as well as directly offering their own telecomms products such as Private 5G.
As the primary partner enabling Netflix to undertake the seminal Cloud Native transformation journey there is no doubt they will be central to the telecomms adoption of the same capabilities.
Enterprise Cloud Services
This means that as Telcos seek to take on more of the practices pioneered in the enterprise space, such as CI/CD and microservices architecture, they have a wealth of learned knowledge and relevant services to call upon.
AWS themselves has a famous ability for rapid digital service innovation, that ultimately telcos are seeking to replicate, and of course they also have deep experience in helping thousands of businesses migrate to the Cloud that can also be leveraged.
SDX writes how Telefónica Germany and Verizon for deploying 5G to the Cloud, using AWS services like Outposts and Wavelength and in a smart move Telefónica has partnered with AWS to develop joint go-to-market services, becoming an AWS competency partner in key areas like Cloud Migration, meaning they can offer enterprise customers a one-stop shop for applications as well as 5G services. They have also launched an innovative TV-Commerce App on Movistar Plus+ to browse (over 20,000 home products) a wide selection of products available on Amazon.es.
There is also the aspect of harnessing the Cloud to access business systems, such as how Ericsson works with AWS to offer a Cloud-based BSS solution.
Cloud Native 5G Networks
Their 5G service is headlined by their partnership with DISH. In this interview Dave Brown explains more behind this deal and TelecomTV describes it as a game-changer for the industry.
AWS possesses a deep subject matter expertise relevant to this trend. For example this AWS white paper describes the hyper-scaler is applying their expertise to the Telco scenario, working with RIFT.ware to define a carrier-grade infrastructure for end-to-end automated management and operation of 5G slices, providing an environment to automate the onboarding and life cycle management of multi-vendor 5G network slices across any Cloud environment.
In this talk with Fabio Cerone of AWS and Marc Rouanne, Chief Network Officer at DISH Wireless, Marc shares his vision for the 5G Cloud Native Network, explaining how it enables the provider with hyper-scalability, able to grow and shrink capacity as required, a rapid digital service innovation pipeline and harnessing of machine learning and data analytics.
Fabio describes how the primary industry requirements they have been working to meet include automation, observability and reducing technology costs while improving performance.
Marc describes their extensive partner selection strategy, which defined a truly Cloud Native, microservices architecture as a central requirement, resulting in them selecting Nokia, Oracle and IBM among others, hosting their software on AWS. New deployments are managed through a strict DevSecOps pipeline to ensure security.
The killer use case Marc envisages for 5G Cloud services is Private 5G for enterprise customers, hence why there are building a ‘network of networks’, so that different industry specific solutions can be developed, where customers are connecting together anything from cars through drones to supply chain inventory.
