Welcome to Apis TechTips! A video series of excerpts from Apis Training’s telecom courses.
This episode of Apis TechTips introduces the concept of the Telco Cloud, and comes from the course Cloud, NFV and SDN in an Hour.
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- Virtualization and Cloud Introduction
- OpenStack and Containers
- NFV – Network Functions Virtualization
- SDN – Software-Defined Networking
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Below you can find the transcribed text for this particular TechTip.
The Telco Cloud
Let me give you an introduction to Telco Cloud. In the image, we have data centers in different places, or geolocations. We have places X, Y, and Z, and HV stands for hypervisor. So we have data centers with compute nodes where we can run virtual machines.
Typically, these would be large data centers, but we can also have smaller data centers, maybe in base station sites or perhaps even at your home. Your home router could be a micro or femto data center where we can run everything that’s going on in your home router: switching, routing, NAT-ing, DHCP-ing, and firewalling.
All of that could be run as virtual machines in your little micro data center in your home router. The point is that it’s the same kind of hardware. It’s COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware everywhere in this execution environment, which is managed by some kind of cloud management (could be OpenStack, for instance) so that we can run different functions in this network.
And it’s COTS, so applications can move. We can move functions where they’re needed either because we have resources to spare in another location or maybe the users are moving and they need low latency. And since there’s just a sea of generic hardware resources that are generally the same, we can move our functions pretty much where they’re needed.
It’s real-time server and payload applications, which is maybe one of the biggest differences between telco cloud and datacom cloud. Datacom Cloud was built for email and web services, and if you get your email 3 seconds late, it doesn’t matter. However, if you get your IP packet containing voice in a phone call 3 seconds late, it really does matter.
So that’s one of the challenges, and it is difficult. It’s one of the important differences that you need to handle, and that’s why there is quite a bit of talk about acceleration technologies and things like that in order to make this actually fly.
And this could also work as a service-agnostic platform, on top of which we can develop innovative applications. So the cloud management could be like an abstraction layer if you will. You don’t need to understand all the underlying technology in order to add new functions. In fact, very much like the Internet. You can start new web services without understanding how TCP/IP works, and that is arguably one of the success factors for the Internet.
