The power of multi-cloud
abril 27, 2021 - Vincent Schaeken
5G Multi-cloud flexibility rapidly converts to service flexibility
As the pandemic lingers on, we can all reminisce about the freedom of holidaying or taking business trips far and wide. Those trips remind me of how people and cultures share common human values, endeavours and aspirations, all with their own flavours and accents. Knowing a few languages helps me to reach out and make those connections with people, and I love it. Regardless of their location, societies behave fundamentally the same: individuals with various skills, contributing to corporate success and public service, to family wellbeing and growth. The result is a well-oiled thriving society.
I see these parallels in the proliferation of telco cloud “societies”. Cloud providers come with different flavours and accents with slightly different agenda’s, but ultimately providing similar foundations to support applications and higher level use cases. We at Openet/Amdocs understand that to thrive across the telco landscape with our market leading charging and policy control network functions, we must adopt an OPEN-NETwork approach by being ready to deploy our solutions on top of each variety of underlying stack, to speak “their language” if you like. By integrating with whatever the cloud stack may be, we can focus on what really matters to the CSP: seamless service onboarding, charging, policy control and monetisation of novel consumer, enterprise and IoT use cases whenever the market dictates it.
Our journey towards cloud native applications is evident from a number of “firsts” in the 4G and 5G landscape: the first containerised charging offering, the first mediation microservice for a Tier 1 operator, the first to bring converged charging and policy control function microservices to market to a Tier 1 group. While we evolved our cloud native offerings, across our telco customer base, we also developed and actively deployed over a wide spectrum of platform and infrastructure stacks, which can be summarized as:
- Containerized Application over virtualization layer over Bare Metal
- Containerized Application with Rancher over VMWare
- Containerized Application with OpenShift over Openstack
- Containerized Application with Rancher on hypercloud (AWS/Azure/Google), both private and public cloud
Each CSP is on a journey to optimize their specific resources and investments, through their evolution from 3G to 4G and prepare for the 5G ecosystem. As an application provider, we simply must be open to plug-in to whichever platform and infrastructure stack is chosen. What matters always is consistent functionality – and flexibility for whatever the service need is. We work tirelessly to make the entire cloud based solution robust, redundant, and secure in whatever cloud arrangement is needed. In some cases, hybrid solutions are required using a combination of virtualized and containerised network functions in the same solution. Through these many integrations, the CSPs we provide for can continue to run and evolve their network as they see fit, in the knowledge and confidence that flexible providers like Openet are on board.
Our cloud-native application journey has taught us that “speaking” the multi-cloud languages cuts right to the heart of the matter: building lasting relationships with trust and expertise and time for CSPs to relax in the knowledge that all is taken care of.
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