Overview
Many telecom providers are in the process of building out 5G network infrastructure, assessing their Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) strategy, and moving more of their IT workloads to the cloud. Equally, many telecom network functions that were once virtual machine-based solutions, are evolving into container-based offerings.
Telecommunication services are sensitive to network latency, and AWS offer various solutions to host different workloads. AWS Local Zone provides a low-latency infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, and other select AWS services close to a telecom provider's edge. AWS offers managed infrastructures for on-premises networks called AWS Outposts in 42-unit racks, and mountable Outposts servers in 2U and 1U form factors supporting functionalities like Radio Access Network (RAN), MEC and real-time application services at far edge, enabling low-latency services to the end-users. AWS Wavelength is located within the telecom service provider's network, enabling telecom end-users to be serviced by applications hosted within their networks
With these trends, there is a need for telecom networking engineers to understand AWS elastic computing and its performance characteristics as well as AWS networking services, such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Transit Gateway, and AWS Direct Connect (DX). These services allow telecom providers to securely connect their on- premises environments to the cloud and achieve the high availability and performance they require. Trends in the Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) for 5G workloads implemented on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) must now also support Kubernetes. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) provides the flexible foundation for container network functions (CNFs).
In considering both Virtual Network Function (VNF) and Cloud Native Function (CNF) deployments, telecom providers have specific demands and require specific features, such as single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), Anti-affinity group support, Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA), Multus Container notes.xmlNetwork Interface (CNI) and central processing unit (CPU) pinning. Telecom providers hosts applications and services that requiring extensive packets per second (PPS) throughputs and the bandwidth requirement exceeding 100 Gbps.
AWS offers a range of services for telecom workloads and network connectivity options. Amazon VPC is a logically isolated environment in the AWS Cloud that gives telecom providers complete control over how they allocate their subnets, configure routing, and implement security through access control lists (ACLs) and security groups. AWS Transit Gateway allows inter-VPC and VPC to on-premises environments connectivity at scale.
Finally, services such as DX and VPNs allow telecom providers to connect their environments to the AWS Cloud in a secure and scalable manner, without compromising on availability. This paper also provides an example of an Operation Support System (OSS) workload running in Amazon VPC and communicating with the telecom provider's network using AWS Direct Connect.
