The Shift to Cloud-native Network Function in the Telecommunications Industry: What it Means for Operators

The telecommunications industry, for many a beast that moves at a geological pace, is taking rapid strides towards implementing cloud technologies. Operators are going cloud-native, delivering, managing, hosting, and running applications in the cloud. They embrace concepts such as microservices, containers and DevOps to reduce costs and speed up processes. This is simply a matter of necessity to give them a chance to keep up with “born in the cloud” competitors in an era of 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and virtualization.

What does cloud-native telco mean for operators?

CSPs going cloud-native explore optimal combinations of microservices, containers, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) delivery. Microservices, as the name suggests, are compact building blocks each with their own data models, repository, and functions that can be accessed only through their own APIs and which can be deployed, developed, and combined in a flexible way. Microservices are run via containers, which store code so that it can be run in all environments (such as production, testing and integration) simultaneously. Containers grant code a high level of adaptivity and portability, allowing any solution to be scaled up or down to meet demand at any given time. Finally, PaaS provides an Internet-based abstraction layer that takes care of software, operating system and network infrastructure so that users can focus fully on developing and deploying applications with a high level of scalability.

The journey to cloud-native telecom

That’s not to say that the path to cloud-nativeness is as simple as adopting microservices, containers, and PaaS. There are challenges, such as high latency and the unreliable connectivity of mobile devices, which need to be overcome before this technology can be successfully implemented and, moreover, monetized. This is where 5G comes into its own, promising LAN-like speeds, broader bandwidth, greater capacity, reduced latency and greater operational efficiency for mobile devices. It’s also important that operators can put an end to their seeming love affair with the physical when it comes to architecture. The cloud, and therefore going cloud-native, means network function virtualization (NFV) for the creation of service topologies that are independent of physical structure and scalability, while opening up the potential for network slicing, by which CSPs’ partners can access and manage their own segments of the operator’s network without investing heavily in infrastructure and its maintenance.

Advances in 5G technology and growing IoT networks redefine telcos

Over-the-top (OTT) players such as Amazon – might be relatively young compared to traditional CSPs, but they were born into a market primed for virtualization and cloud-nativeness. For these organizations, the cloud and the massive opportunities presented by the IoT and 5G are simply a natural way to speed up their own natural evolution. If telcos want to keep up, they must continue their own shift to the cloud.