After Years of Talk, Hybrid Clouds Hold Promise for Carriers

Carriers are still working through how to approach the cloud, experts said Thursday during a webinar by data services company Pure Storage and GSMA’s Mobile World Live. Experts said the hybrid cloud, with data in both public and private clouds, and at on-premise data centers, is starting to become a reality.

The hybrid cloud has been talked about for a long time and became a reality only in the past few years, said Joe Gardiner, Pure director-cloud native architecture. Trying to build a hybrid model with the virtual infrastructure available to carriers “is incredibly difficult,” he said. A lot of investment and time has gone into something “that in the past was very challenging,” he said.

Vendors are using new cloud technologies like containerization, which are “infrastructure agnostic,” Gardiner said: “That is what is enabling hybrid cloud to now become a reality.”

The trend has been that telecom companies made “huge investments” and moved workload and applications services to the public cloud, said Abraham Barnes, Pure Storage senior director-subscription portfolio. There has been “a little bit of a trend of … returning some of those workloads to on premise,” he said. Providers are still searching for “the perfect blend” of using public cloud and keeping data in-house, he said.

Carriers are in the middle of a “balancing act,” Barnes said. They’re trying to optimize their legacy operations, often in the hybrid cloud, while also preparing for 6G and new services, he said. One carrier client told Pure that the transition from 4G to 5G “meant that everything had to scale by 10x,” he said. The carrier found it “wasn’t sustainable, both monetarily and from a people perspective, to just keep doing the status quo,” Barnes said.

Cloud native offers “the ability to break networks down into microservices, and then run them inside pods, independent of the underlying hardware,” Sharad Srivastava, Rakuten Symphony senior vice president-engineering, explained at a Silverlinings forum Wednesday. Microservices involves breaking software into “independent pieces of software that talk together, so that you can upgrade each piece of software independently,” he said.

The major layers of 5G, the central units (CUs), distributed units (DUs) and cores, “lend themselves to microservices,” Srivastava said. Networks now consist of “a jungle of boxes” and each box “can be implemented as microservices,” he said. The units need to be “upgraded for constantly evolving new use cases” and “to constantly fix security vulnerabilities,” he said. The components also have to stay up to speed with devices “that are innovating faster than the rest of the network,” he said.

Dell’Oro Group counts more than 45 stand-alone 5G networks so far, using a cloud-native core, said Research Director Dave Bolan. In the 5G core, there are more than 50 top-level network functions, which is “maybe triple what we dealt with within 4G,” he said. For a provider thinking about upgrading to a 5G stand-alone network “it could be a bit of a shock for as to how much you have to deal with,” he said.