Welcome to the world of the Cloud Native Telco, where innovation meets efficiency and scalability.
In this book, we will explore the compelling reasons why the telecommunications industry should embrace the trend of cloud-native architecture.
From enhanced agility to cost savings, the benefits and opportunities that await are truly remarkable.
The Netflix Era of Cloud IT
Like every enterprise sector telecommunications is seeking to harness the evolution of IT pioneered by Netflix, building hyper-scale systems using containers and a microservices architecture.
Netflix ushered in a new era of ‘web scale IT’, a technology architecture that naturally leverages the global, elastic capacity of the Cloud and enables a high velocity rate of digital service innovation.
The enterprise sector has been quick to understand how this approach can be applied to their existing IT estate and a vendor ecosystem has organized around fulfilling that potential. Smart CSPs will be next to build upon that learning further and leverage that momentum to replicate it to achieve the same for Telco services.
For CSPs this has a number of dimensions.
The telecommunications industry is undergoing a transformation like never before. The traditional telco infrastructure is being replaced by cloud-native solutions that offer unparalleled flexibility and scalability. But what exactly is a Cloud Native Telco?
A Cloud Native Telco is an architecture that leverages cloud computing technologies to deliver telecommunications services. It is built on the principles of microservices, containerization, and orchestration, allowing for rapid development, deployment, and scaling of applications. By decoupling services from the underlying infrastructure, telcos can achieve greater agility and efficiency.
Benefits of Cloud Native Telco
The shift towards a Cloud Native Telco brings numerous benefits to the telecommunications industry. One of the key advantages is enhanced agility. With cloud-native architecture, telcos can quickly adapt to changing market demands and launch new services at a fraction of the time it would take with traditional infrastructure.
Cost savings are another compelling reason to embrace the trend. By leveraging cloud resources, telcos can reduce capital expenditures on hardware and infrastructure. Additionally, the pay-as-you-go model allows for better cost control and optimization.
Scalability is also a significant advantage of cloud-native solutions. Telcos can easily scale their services up or down based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and customer satisfaction. This flexibility is crucial in an industry where traffic patterns can vary significantly.
Embracing the Cloud Native Telco trend requires a shift in mindset and a willingness to adopt new technologies and practices. Telcos need to invest in building a cloud-native infrastructure, including containerization platforms and orchestration tools.
Furthermore, a cultural transformation is necessary to foster collaboration and agility within the organization. Telcos must encourage cross-functional teams and embrace DevOps practices to enable continuous integration and deployment.
Roadmap
The great potential for telcos is that industry experts commonly agree on what this journey involves, notably the ‘Cloudification’ of telco networks through:
- Virtualizing network functions. Since the advent of the Cloud era telcos have been undertaking to virtualize networking functions (NFVs) previously executed via dedicated hardware solutions. ‘CNFs’ represent the next iteration of this evolution – Cloud Native Network Functions.
- Utilize Kubernetes for containers. Telcos are prioritizing Kubernetes for containerizing and managing these network functions, tailoring it for their industry and adopting it for key use cases such as an Edge platform.
- Employing a microservices architecture. The next step in this evolution is to decompose monolithic applications into modular microservice components.
The purpose of our Roadmap is to provide a single framework for synthesizing these innovations into a vendor neutral blueprint, for Telcos to plan their Cloud Native journey, aggregating expert insights from across the entire industry.
