eBOOK Carrier cloudification: What every telecom executive needs to know

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

This document is designed to help Telecom executives understand the technologies, trends, and solutions as they move towards ‘cloudification’. The telecom industry has come under considerable competitive pressure from public cloud providers to change how they do business for long-term viability. Canonical has the solutions and expertise to help telecoms make the move from the rigid business models of the past to delivering revenue generating services much faster.

What you will learn

Canonical is driving telecom innovation

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, works closely with its partners on all aspects of the journey to telecom cloudification. We provide infrastructure and partner solutions to support the creation of revenue generating services, reduced operational costs, and improved efficiency.

These communication service providers trust Canonical to become more competitive:

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Christopher Wilder Content Marketing, Canonical

Christopher Wilder leads content creation for Cloud Marketing at Canonical. He has domain expertise in Cloud Computing and Infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, business Analytics, networking, communications, and software defined infrastructure.

Chris is the author of the book Big Software Has Arrived, and the co-author of the best-seller, Influencing the Influencers. Chris is a frequent contributor to Forbes and TechTarget. He has also published multiple columns on software and technologies in The New York Times, Boston Globe, CEO Magazine, and others. He serves on TechTarget’s Cloud Advisory board, and is a trusted advisor for dozens of technology companies worldwide.

About the author

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Executive Summary

The six factors that are disrupting the Telecom industry

The building blocks for moving towards telecom cloudification

Customer Use Cases

Conclusion

Find out More

About Canonical

Contents

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

New imperatives, technologies, and the emergence of the public cloud are forcing telecom service providers to rethink and validate their fundamental business assumptions. The cloud has forced today’s telecom service providers to transform and perform at increasingly high speeds, counter to their normal mode of operations. Due to customer demand, operators are moving away from just providing connectivity.

Telecom service providers are positioning beyond their traditional core business to developing an ecosystem of new capabilities and services that will grow revenue and deliver long-term viability. They are increasingly being driven by impatient customers and intensifying competition.

Over the past several years, we have seen the rise of new players that have emerged to control major parts of the traditional telecommunications market share like Samsung and Apple on devices, public cloud providers including AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform controlling customer data and infrastructure, and component vendors like ARM and Intel are impacting the telecom supply chain.

Conversely, we have seen the decline of many of the incumbent providers, especially NEPs (network equipment providers) like Ericsson, Cisco, and Huawei, who are for the first time finding competitive pressure from distributed systems running on commodity hardware.

Executive Summary

This has created a significant shift in the balance of power in the industry and traditional telecom service providers are finding themselves in a diminished role providing primarily network transport, connectivity, and service enablement.

However, It’s not all doom-and-gloom for the telecom service provider industry. Today’s telecoms have realized they can compete at the customer or regional level for a share of wallet by providing value-added services that public cloud providers simply cannot compete with, for example: IoT (Internet of Things) device provisioning, mobile device management, fraud prevention, mobile payments and so on.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

As the number of connected and mobile devices increase, telecoms are finding themselves at the center of the ecosystem. This complex environment is evolving, particularly in the enterprise, to include smart phones, wearables, home automation, metering, and connected cars.

To ensure their future viability, telecom operators are adopting infrastructure and virtualization tools including; OpenStack, Linux containers, NFV (network functions virtualization)/SDN (software-defined networking) to create a scalable cloud infrastructure without having to invest in massive amounts of specialized hardware and software.

These tools offer operators a lower TCO (total cost of ownership), improved elasticity and economies of scale. Many telecom service providers are moving in the right direction with NFV and SDN for efficient resource allocation. However, moving to a consumption-based business model for deploying services like the public cloud providers, from a traditional leased-based model per circuit is a phase change for telecommunication providers.

While these solutions are a logical step away from a reliance on expensive legacy solutions, the ultimate end game is telecom carrier cloudification.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Carriers are losing revenue from over-the-top vendors

Juniper Research estimates, network operators and carriers will lose nearly $100B from over the top (OTT) services in 2017. OTT technologies are used to send multi-media such as voice, video, television to connected devices without the use of a telecom or service provider controlling the distribution.

Applications such as Whatsapp and Skype all provide overlapping services with those provided by telecoms and service providers.

OTT creates an inherent conflict of interest for traditional last-mile carriers who want to offer similar services but are forced to provide a high level of quality to a competitor that bypasses their traditional distribution channels.

Canonical’s OpenStack NFV/VNF solutions allow telecom and service providers with the tools necessary to deploy traditional cloud services or to deliver services that compete directly with OTT solutions.

Six factors that are disrupting the Telecom industry

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Security has become front-and-center

Customers are demanding proactive solutions across their entire infrastructure rather than just operational and technical band-aids. Customers are playing a deeper role across all aspects of the network and they demand carriers provide more proactive protection at every point. Moreover, as infrastructure becomes software-defined so does its vulnerability for bits and byte attacks. Security has become both a challenge and an opportunity for forward thinking carriers if they embrace the need and make the right investments to fight emerging threats.

Canonical’s Ubuntu provides the security, versatility, and policies needed for managing and running most workloads in the public and private cloud. As cloud workloads expand, Juju provides a way to deploy and scale secure environments across both private and public workloads via Juju Charms. Using Charms is what gives Juju its incredible capabilities to manage applications in complex infrastructures. Charms are intelligent scripts wrapped around hundreds of applications that allow them to be dynamically configured and deployed without manual configuration.

Further, Canonical has developed a kernel live patching services that enables runtime correction of critical security issues in the kernel without rebooting. It is a solid way to ensure that machines are safe at the kernel level, while guaranteeing uptime, especially for container hosts where a single machine may be running thousands of different workloads. Beyond securing desktops, servers, IoT devices or virtual guests, Canonical Livepatch Service is particularly useful in container environments since every container will shares the same kernel.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

IoT, 5G, and big data are causing an explosion of data traffic

In the coming years, we will see the new next upswing of devices that deliver megabytes of data and information to cloud providers. As a matter of fact, many experts believe organizations will quickly push through exabytes of information to zettabytes of data per year. IoT and big data, combined with the capacity capabilities of 5G, will change how operator’s customers manage how they mine, deploy, and operationalize large amounts of data.

Data collected is both static and dynamic. Some of it, like SMS, will last forever, some of it, like system status or logs, will be gone as soon as it’s created. All of it can be influential in the business process.

The pool of big data in any given telco will continue to grow. The technologies used to gather, store, and analyse big data will constantly evolve. Canonical offers all the components and partner ecosystem necessary to be successful with big data and IoT data analysis.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

5G will bring a new class of applications and technologies

Most telcos have begun developing their 5G architecture. 5G is the next generation of mobile network after 4G LTE. One of the key components for 5G’s success is Software defined networking (SDN) and Network function virtualization (NFV) to deliver on broadband intensive applications and services like streaming video, virtual reality, conferencing, and a significant increase in numbers of connected devices.

Canonical is leading much of the telecom innovation to support the demands 5G promises to impose on their infrastructure. Our OpenStack solution provides the framework to support both SDN and NFV functionality. MAAS ensures their hardware infrastructure has enough capacity to handle any workload, while Juju makes it easy to integrate, deploy, and manage big data applications and services.

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Service Integration increases ARPU

The cost of service integration has decreased, but many telecom organizations are seeing their share of revenue, especially from the likes of Netflix, Showtime, HBO, and others, decreasing substantially. Further, connectivity, especially for last mile providers, is capturing a smaller proportion of the information value chain while content, services, and digital products are capturing more customer information thereby leaving last mile providers out of the loop. This is why telecoms are eyeing private cloud solutions to help align content, infrastructure, and a platform for long-term viability.

Canonical helps telecom operators to compete by providing cloud solutions like OpenStack NFV, service modeling with Juju, server provisioning via MAAS, and many other solutions that bring efficiency and the ability to quickly deliver competitive revenue-generating services. Additionally, Canonical allows telecoms to have our experts build, run, and support their cloud through our Bootstack offering, which helps alleviate the learning curve and bring solutions to market faster.

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Model driven operations make it easier to deploy cloud services

As big software becomes more and more complex, telecoms and DevOps organizations are moving to model driven operations to improve how software is not just deployed but scaled and operated across the organization. Further, connecting services today has become an integration challenge with may administrators not having a central understanding of how everything fits together or their dependencies. Unfortunately, most telecoms do not have the tools or technologies to overcome the challenges of Big Software.

Telecom executives are turning to model driven operations to deploy software and cloud services across multiple domains and environments faster and more efficiently. Software modelling solutions like Canonical’s Juju helps telecoms to build and deploy proofs of concepts faster, integrate solutions more seamlessly while expanding their organization’s capabilities more broadly. Operations modeling allow network administrators and developers to free up their time and focus on bring to market revenue-generating solutions and services, rather than architecting complicated network stacks and deploying additional resources.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

As operators take on the journey to cloudifyingtheir infrastructure, there will be many challenges, opportunities, and phase shifts along the way. However, there will remain three pillars that will be the foundation for years to come. They include; NFV on OpenStack, containers, and legacy bare metal servers/equipment. Alone, each of these solutions solves a specific technology challenge, but together, they provide a comprehensive strategy that allows operators to bring new services that are secure, efficient, elastic, and at scale.

The following is how these technologies are evolving the telecom of the future:

For telecoms, NFV represents one of the most significant phase shift opportunities in modern times.

NFV has matured to become one of the primary technologies enabling telecoms, enterprises, and managed service providers used to deploy their own private clouds and extend their public cloud offerings more efficiently.

Initial traction for NFV includes services like; real-time communications (voice, video, messaging), big data, network load balancing, monitoring, and web services, etc. NFV allows companies to accelerate innovation and deploy services and applications faster, thereby reducing time-to-market for revenue-generating services.

At the heart of NFV are VNFs (Virtual network functions). VNFs are the software applications that separate the hardware and software. VNFs include virtual services like: intrusion detection, WAN accelerators, firewalls, etc.

As carriers move to embrace cloud-native, they also understand NFV and the VIM (Virtual infrastructure manager) – typically VMware in the enterprise or public cloud and OpenStack in telecoms and private cloud – are not required to be carrier-grade (9×5 uptime), but the services or cloud native applications must be at least five nines.

(According to OpenStack’s 2016 user survey, ~55% of OpenStack deployments are deployed on Canonical’s Ubuntu)

The building blocks for moving towards telecom cloudification

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Further, Canonical has partnered with leading operators like Telefonica, British Telecom, Telenor, and Telecom Austria to form a new ETSI-hosted (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) open source project called Open source MANO (OSM). This project focuses on evolving and bringing to market a compliant information model that will bring the promise of an ecosystem of Virtualized network function (VNF) vendors to a uniform deployment model while providing a path to use cases that can be leveraged by operators to deploy solutions at the lowest possible integration costs.

Telecoms are turning to OpenStack as their NFV foundation of choice.

Operators are working to diligently continue to monetize their infrastructure. Firms like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Verizon have begun to offer value-added services commercially on an OpenStack NFV platform. Solutions like voice, video, and messaging via WebRTC VNFs, Hadoop in big data, and other network based solutions are contributing to this phase shift.

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Containers are making telecoms more efficient while bringing revenue-generating services to market faster.

Outdated tools and methodologies are putting more demand on telecoms, DevOps, application developers, and IT departments. Orchestration tools like Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm allow enterprises to coordinate and automate standard processes, workflows, and tasks within a cloud or the data centre environment. Orchestration uses templates, integration elements, and shared resources to replicate and automate time-consuming functions. As applications residing in the cloud increases, so does the increased need for containers. Containers bring the ability for organizations to move applications seamlessly between servers and environments.

Most telecoms have recognized containers as a way to improve IT efficiency, deploy, and integrate applications faster, all the while making the cloud transition easier. Containers promise to help telecoms not just to overcome technology challenges, but deliver business outcomes faster. Linux-based container ecosystems, including Docker, Canonical’s LXC; LXD Hypervisors, for secure and guaranteed delivery of containers, and Ubuntu’s Juju and the Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes for orchestration and container automation are radically transforming how telecoms build, deploy, and deliver new applications and services. Containers promise to help operators to augment current capabilities and methods while improving performance.

However, LXD isn’t just about performance. There are many workloads, especially within big data, that run in public clouds as guest instances. Today, nearly all those instances are virtual machines. One of the benefits of LXD machine containers is it provides process isolation and application mobility (live migration) to running processes. That means increased manageability for public cloud instances, as well as bare metal and private cloud solutions.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Telecoms need to leverage the security and performance of their legacy hardware infrastructure.

Hardware has always been an expensive and difficult resource to deploy, but it is unfortunately still a major consideration for telecoms moving towards becoming cloud native. To become more cost-effective, operators hire teams of developers to cobble together software solutions that solve functional business challenges while leveraging existing legacy hardware in the hopes of offsetting the need to buy and deploy more hardware-based solutions.

Canonical’s bare metal server provisioning solution, MAAS (Metal as a Service), allows operators to deploy physical hardware as opposed to virtual environments.

Underpinning the service there are common technologies like PXE and IPMI to ensure interoperability and support for a diversity of hardware. MAAS makes it easy to provision physical servers as easily as deploying a virtual machine in the cloud with full programmatic control over the hardware and its capabilities. Further, MAAS works across all vendors and operating systems including Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat and Suse.

MAAS isn’t a new concept, but demand and adoption rates are growing because many enterprises want to combine the flexibility of cloud services with the raw power of bare metal servers to run high-power, scalable workloads.

MAAS, however, is a new way of thinking about physical infrastructure and how organizations can leverage the best of all worlds. This is especially true for compute, storage, and networking as they have become commodities in the virtual world.

MAAS lets enterprises treat farms of servers as malleable resources for dynamic allocation to specific areas within their businesses. MAAS is much like any XaaS business model dedicated to a specific tenant, but the main difference is customers choose the type of compute configuration they want in their servers (e.g. ×86, single, dual, or quad core processors) combined with applicable storage, memory, and other functionality.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Applications and workloads can then be deployed onto servers that have the sufficient compute power, storage, and an operating system that allows for optimal performance and efficiency.

Telecoms can use specific software solutions for a long time, all the while, replacing the underlying hardware infrastructure at a much faster rate. Scale-out is all about applications and the delivery of services while separating physical hardware from application and data services. MAAS allows organizations to make the most out of their existing hardware infrastructure. Operators can manage and deploy physical infrastructure with the same flexibility and ease as virtual cloud environments.

Specifically, IT organizations can deploy, (re)allocate physical servers to meet cloud workflow requirements, and retire hardware when it’s no longer needed – or to reallocate resources to be available for new workloads on demand.

MAAS makes it possible for organizations to make the most of their hardware by enabling hardware to reprovision systems for the needs of the data centre. For example, a server used for transcoding video 20 minutes ago is now a Kubernetes worker node, later a Hadoop MapReduce node, and tomorrow something else entirely.

Telecom providers are leveraging MAAS to drive efficiency, but combined with OpenStack, operators can now take advantage of flexible private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Thereby, allowing organizations that own their own physical data centres to stand-up their individual private cloud environments with the ability to economically compete with both public and hybrid cloud providers. Effectively, enabling telecoms to become their own cloud service providers (CSPs).

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Telecommunications providers have a large and diverse customer base. They process billions of transactions from phone calls, text messages, and data packets. The demand for telecom services is increasing with customers demanding streaming of television, movies, music, social networking, location based services, and more.

Customers are expecting to always be connected and able to consume services anywhere, anytime. The result is putting considerable demands on telecom operators network infrastructure. Operators need to have the ability to deploy scalable, cost-efficient, revenue generating services quickly. Further, they must have the ability to remove these solutions as quickly as they were created if they prove to be non efficient or profitable.

Customer use cases

Companies like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, Bell Canada, Colt, CenturyLink, Tele2 and others have turned to Canonical to help solve their most pressing infrastructure challenges.

The following is a brief solution’s overview from selected telecommunications companies:

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DT (Deutsche Telekom) is one of the largest telecommunications, information technology, multimedia, and security service providers in the world.

The challenge: DT is in the process of modernizing its entire network infrastructure to be sustainable for the next 20-years. Their primary objectives are to take advantage of a common pan-European platform and benefit from network function virtualization (NFV). This project involves replacing over 800 distinct physical network functions in 10 markets with 90 virtualized network functions serving all operating markets. All voice and data for DT will move to this IPv6 only, Ubuntu OpenStack platform.

The solution: In 2014, Canonical partnered with DT to explore building their critical infrastructure, starting with three VNF POCs (proof-of-concepts) on a Canonical OpenStack deployment in Croatia. In 2016, DT selected Canonical to design, build, and support this new infrastructure initiative. Canonical is a critical component in the deployment of their new environment.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Time Warner Cable was aquired by Charter Communications and is marketed under the Spectrum brand. Prior to its acquisition in 2016 by Charter Communications, Time Warner was the second largest cable company in the United States. The company provides both residential and business communication, media, and Internet services.

The challenge: Time Warner launched an initiative to deliver to its customer’s self-service features like geo-redundant object storage and global identity. One of the main challenges was to deploy cloud-based service offerings, facilitate DR (disaster recovery), and SDN (software defined networking) functionality to become more operationally efficient.

The solution: in 2013, Time Warner Cable (TWC) turned to Canonical to run Ubuntu OpenStack within two data centres as part of their strategy to improve utilisation, accelerate service innovation, deployment, and delivery. Since that time, the scope and scale of their OpenStack environment have grown extensively.

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Carrier cloudification: what every telecom executive needs to know

Based in the United Kingdom, Sky UK is the largest commercial broadcaster in the UK and Germany. The company also provides communications and Internet services.

The challenge: Faced with aggressive competition from ‘Over the Top’ players operating on customer premise equipment (set top boxes), Sky required a ‘Greenfield’ data design that would make them more competitive and move away from the unsustainable economics of its present data centre infrastructure.

The solution: Sky UK chose Ubuntu OpenStack solution to ensure it had a modern private cloud infrastructure that was automated, hardware interoperable, and economically viable.

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Conclusion

There is no doubt that cloud is the biggest thing to happen to the telecom industry since VoIP began displacing POTS (Plain old telephone service). However, operators continue to be marred in the business processes and tools from a decade ago. To survive, communications companies must change their ways and move to remove friction in how they deploy services to their customers.

Canonical has a long history of driving cloud innovation. Canonical has been the infrastructure for the modern network of some of the world’s largest telecommunications providers. We first invested in enabling cloud technologies in our software stack as early as 2006. We were the first to ship open source private cloud infrastructure, and had a critical role in founding and launching OpenStack.

In addition to our leadership position in public cloud, where we run over 60% of all workloads, we are the most commonly deployed OpenStack platform, accounting for more footprint than every other vendor combined.

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The telecommunications service provider marketplace is no doubt changing and operators need a partner that can help them navigate the cloudification waters.

Canonical can help organizations with:

The experience & insight to choose the right technology infrastructure for their business

Services & solutions that can be quickly deployed for faster time to market and lower total cost of ownership

World-class support to ensure deployments are secure and stable

Cloudification made easy

To learn more about how Canonical can help, please visit ubuntu.com/cloud

Or to discuss how Canonical solutions can benefit your organization,please fill out the contact form at ubuntu.com/cloud/contact-us

To get started now with OpenStack or the Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes try it by downloading conjure-up.

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At Canonical, we are passionate about the potential of open source software to transform business. For over a decade, we have supported the development of Ubuntu and promoted its adoption in the enterprise.

By providing custom engineering, supportcontracts and training, we help clients in thetelecoms and IT services industries to cutcosts, improve efficiency and tighten securitywith Ubuntu and OpenStack. We work withhardware manufacturers like HP, Dell andIntel, to ensure the software we create can bedelivered on the world’s most popular devices.And we contribute thousands of man-hoursevery year to projects like OpenStack, toensure that the world’s best open sourcesoftware continues to fulfil its potential.

Visit ubuntu.com and canonical.com

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