Accelerating the All Cloud Transformation: Cloud Native beyond Virtualization

By Liu Hao, Senior Marketing Manager, Cloud Core Network, Huawei Technologies, Inc.

The first decade of 21st century saw the fast development IP-based networks. In the second decade, carrier networks embrace all cloud transformation for a better connected world.

The history of the communications industry is made of technology advancements. Carriers keep using the latest technology to transform networks to provide better experience for subscribers. In the last decade, the introduction of the IP technology changes the communication architectures and business models, enabling carriers to efficiently roll out diversified services to meet subscribers' personalized requirements.

Now, we are in the middle of a great transformation from a traditional to an information society. People's increasing dependency on the Internet is changing the way they study, work, and live. Internet-based user experience features Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY, and Social (ROADS), which is something that traditional networks fail to provide due to their inadequacy in resource sharing, agile innovation, elastic extension, and easy maintenance. To offer ROADS, carriers must deeply change their network architectures, operation models, and service development.

Like the IP technology did in the last decade, the booming software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and cloud computing technologies will help carriers fully evolve their networks and build an open, interconnected, and innovative ecosystem. These technologies will maximize the potential of Internet-based networks and lead to another industry model transformation.

All Cloud features pooled hardware resources, fully distributed architectures, and full automation.

As is known to all, Huawei's Single strategy in the past all-IP era efficiently supported carriers' fast development. Today, Huawei advocates the All Cloud strategy to build efficient and agile telecommunication networks, promote network upgrades, and enable industry digital transformation, helping carriers succeed by satisfying subscriber needs.

The greatest value of All Cloud lies in providing software-defined functions, which is also the greatest challenge in achieving All Cloud. Huawei advocates, promotes, and leads the full cloudification of products and solutions, driving business success and industry development.

All Cloud cloudifies the equipment, networks, services, and operations of basic networks.

The All Cloud strategy provides pooled hardware resources to maximize resource sharing, fully distributed architectures to ensure high system scalability, elasticity, and reliability, and full automation to achieve automatic resource scheduling and troubleshooting.

All Cloud of carrier networks must go through three phases: Virtualization, Cloudification, and Cloud Native.

All Cloud of carrier networks must go through three phases: Virtualization, Cloudification, and Cloud Native. Cloudification and Cloud Native are two forms to achieve full network cloudification. Virtualization is not the equivalent of Cloudification. Currently, the solutions provided by most vendors in the industry are still in the Virtualization phase that only decouples software from hardware. In contrast, Huawei uses the cloudification design principle right from the beginning to provide higher flexibility and reliability.

Figure 1-1 Three phases to achieve All Cloud

Virtualization is the first phase of NFV development. With hardware and software decoupled, a plurality of VNFs can be deployed on unified hardware, improving resource utilization.

In the Cloudification phase, the VNF architecture is optimized and reconstructed by capitalizing on cloudification concepts to support a three-layer software architecture. The new architecture consists of distributed load balancing, distributed database, and stateless service processing units, and can complete elastic scaling in a few seconds without interrupting ongoing sessions. The new architecture also introduces automatic services and resources orchestration to enhance the flexibility and elasticity of the entire system. In addition, technology innovations, such as KPI-based health check and self-recovery as well as disaster tolerance spanning multiple DCs, make 99.999% carrier-class reliability a reality for cloud networks.

When carrier networks enter the Cloud Native era, innovative technologies, such as network slicing, agile infrastructure, micro-services, containers, PaaS, are introduced to build a new ICT business model. With the new technologies, VNFs are flexibly assembled, network services are released at any time, network operations and maintenance, and service operations are conducted automatically. Carriers can quickly meet different network requirements and differentiated business demands, achieving the final All Cloud transformation.

Huawei works with world-leading carriers in All Cloud transformation.

Carriers have a long way to reach All Cloud. They need to conduct a comprehensive transformation covering network architecture, organizational talent, procurement model, business model, and operation model. Huawei joints world-leading carriers to proactively explore in All Cloud transformation, providing successful cloud transformation experience that can be replicated and referenced in the industry.

Being one of the most active industry-leading telecom carriers, Vodafone is eager to deploy the next-generation network architecture and technology and puts forward an "Everything moves on Cloud" vision, to reduce costs, get new services to market early, and implement nimble operation. In July of 2015, with Huawei's full assistance, Vodafone announced the launch of the world's first cloud VoLTE commercial network in Italy, which was a landmark event of the year in the industry.

Huawei has established a total of three NFV Open Labs in Xi'an (in China), Silicon Valley (in the USA), and Munich (in Germany) to carry out integration verifications and joint innovations with carriers, partners, and industry organizations. These actions effectively accelerate the industrialization process of NFV. As of Q2 in 2016, Huawei has established strategic cooperation with a number of world-leading carriers with nearly 70 cloud commercial networks deployed or being deployed. Except for the cloud VoLTE commercial network deployed for Vodafone, Huawei has deployed Europe's first cloud VoWiFi commercial network for Belgium Telenet, Europe's first cloud EPC network for Monaco Telecom, world's first cloud DRA network for Hutchison in the UK, and made the first commercial application of cloud networks in the Middle East a reality for Ooredoo. Ooredoo and Huawei have jointly won the "Mobile Infrastructure Innovation Award" at the Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation Awards 2016.

All Cloud has become the industry goal and development trend.

Latest surveys conducted by Heavy Reading (a renowned consultancy) in June, 2016 proved that 96% of carriers have started network cloudification and 45% of these carriers plan to achieve All Cloud before 2020.

AT&T, being the industry leader and benchmark, launched a Domain2.0 project in 2013. AT&T aims to complete a hardware-centric to software-centric transformation in network infrastructure, to provide open cloud networks and reconstruct carriers' services. AT&T plans to complete the network transformation before 2020. By then, software will account for 75% of a network, and AT&T will also be software-centric.

World-leading carriers, such as Vodafone, Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and Ooredoo, also release their network transformation strategies and objectives for 2020. Huawei will cooperate with industrial partners to help carriers in the All Cloud progress and promote the healthy and sustainable development of the industry.

For more information, please visit HuaweiConnect 2016 website.

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About Huawei

Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry. Driven by customer-centric innovation and open partnerships, Huawei has established an end-to-end ICT solutions portfolio that gives customers competitive advantages in telecom and enterprise networks, devices and cloud computing. Huawei’s 170,000 employees worldwide are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. Our innovative ICT solutions, products and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world’s population. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a private company fully owned by its employees.