Google Cloud in a Telco World
Public Cloud providers have been accelerating their efforts in Telecom Business and to much extent, telecoms all around world (already going through rapid technology transformation) have also recognized the importance of walking in hand with Public Cloud providers.
Whether Microsoft recent acquisitions of Affirmed and Meta-switch networks or Amazon doing symposium depicting Telco Cloud Operators AWS capabilities and Google announcing revolutionary Multi-cloud support PaaS i.e. GCP Anthos and got various partnership contracts with big telcos like AT&T and Orange.
Let’s again start with some basic faqs in layman’s term, If you understand Telco, you can skip these and scroll for dive section.
What is Telco Cloud and How it differs from IT Cloud/other Applications?
It differs a lot as Telco need to run very high throughput data transfer business with Ultra low latency even now as 5G in place, Further they also need security of data at high level hence of-course platform resiliencies(HA, Disaster management) i.e. reliability with utmost care .With NFV -SDN in place, Telcos are rapidly virtualizing the extensive Network devices in this cloudnative world and even now movement from NFVI to CNFI, VNF to CNF and IaaS to CaaS have been triggered a lot.
Telco’s Private Cloud v/s Public Cloud Approach?
Since Telco had such specific requirements which previously public cloud provider did not adapt and offered considering lots of complexities it have and Of-course since Telco were already having huge datacenters in place, Hence Capex of going towards public cloud was always a farfetched idea and then comes a big concern for data security as well, but with emerging world many of such evolution in public cloud has been taken care considering telco offerings.
What is now becoming a solution for Telcos?
Now Public Cloud has already grown multifold at a rapid pace with ML/Analytics and lots of inbuilt capabilties which we will see in next section. So There should be a mid way with , Where telcos will still utilize their huge datacenters maintaining certain major applications data integreties and can also leverage various cut-edge capabilities of the Public Cloud Providers Hence a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud approach is win-win solution.
Since I have been exploring GCP recently, So further in this article, I will be stick with the Title of story and will explain the below designed mindmap with understanding I got learning GCP:-
How GCP is empowering Telcos (Let’s take a dive):-
1. Multi Cloud approach
As, I told that’s a best approach to proceed with.
Azure Arc v/s AWS Outpost v/s GCP Anthos
While Azure Arc and GCP Anthos are similar cloud management plane service or PaaS which can manage on-permise cloud infra as well public cloud. AWS Outpost differs with other two and is the on premise service like Azure stack, Where AWS only provides the fully managed hardware as well as to be kept at on prem.
GCP Anthos recently introduced with GKE seems to be a promising PaaS in this game with all capabilities to manage your infra whether its own prem or over GCP and over AWS too, now providing Anthos API support.
GCP Stackdriver monitoring capabilities also support multi-cloud EC2 instances monitoring as well GCE.
GCP Cloudinterconnect services also offers high bandwidth direct connectivity of Onprem cloud to GCP.
2. Cloudnative- Opensource approach
We all know , Google is the one who developed and open-sourced Kubernetes, the biggest revolution in recent technologies with container orchestration and also came out as a top project of CNCF.
Hence GCP provides the best native capabilities with their GKE i.e. Google Kubernetes Engine.
Google has also given Istio service meshing capabilties project to the opensource community which has been part of CNCF and now Google newly form OUG too.
Google has opensourced Tensorflow, quite a pioneer platform for state of art of Machine Learning various in built libraries best in built.
In serverless deployment too, Google has open-sourced Knative Kubernetes Native again a CNCF project gaining lots of attraction.
3) Artificial intelligence , Data Analytics at Scale
AI has been the biggest motivational force and very important capabilities of GCP natively provided in multiple services.
As we already discussed about Google Tensorflow, Google provides various inbuilt libraries taking care of your big data and ofcourse the data analytics and specifically built a AI Contact Center around it.
Google’s Cloudvision API again empowering vision detection capabilties such as image, OCR, Google Lens/Maps has been using this from quite a while now.
4. CaaS/KaaS i.e the movement to cloudnative world towards Container
Google GKE provides you fully managed and secured hosting of K8s over GCloud and closely knits now with multi cloud too with anthos.
Google Velostrata Migration is a service designed for your movement to Cloudnative GCP world i.e. automated or guided movement from virtual machines for AWS, on prem cloud to GCE and then using Anthos capabiltiies it can be further introduced into GKE as well.
Google Locust, A Load testing tool for Kubernetes in GKE world, is quite important when we try to onboard a telco CNF where we are fully sure about the dedicated infra and its capabilties with the benchmarking of the load we performed here.
5. Serverless with Google Managed service
Google has variety of suites catering requirements specific for any serverless request
GCP Bigquery is to be used when we deal with huge massive datasets which we usually see in telecom worlds with CDRs around
GCP Clouddataprep provides inbuilt data analytics capabilities to perform in a serverless manner with various Machine learning models to ingest.
GCP Clouddataproc again provides capabilities to interact with Apache spark and Hadoop big data to take care of data streaming/processing.
5. Automated Infrastructure (DevOps with IaC)
Google Deployment Manager already consists of automated template capabilties to proceed multiple actions with support of terraform template as well
Google App engine with extensive marketplace in built applications and capabilities , Google can further enhance it with cloudnative of VNF relative capabilities too in future.
Google Apigee edge provides multiple capabilties to leverage in built APIs to for various usecases.
Google also provides Inbuilt IDE as on cloud source repositories to integrate every deployment seamlessly in an GitOps with IaC manner.
6. Other Telco Benefits
Like Google Cloud spanner provides asynchronous replication with consistency which is pretty much needed in a session management in Telco Voice/Data traffic.
Sole Tenant Hosting/Dedicated host are capabilities which Telco can utilize in case of Data plane and Network acceleration techniques.
GMEC, Google Mobile Edge Cloud provides capabilities for access or Edge application/services for which GCloud had also partnered with AT&T.
Google Andromeda, meanwhile, is utilized for Software Defined Networking (SDN) for virtualized world, acting as the orchestration point for provisioning, configuring, and managing virtual networks and in-network packet processing
Google Maglev a Network load balancer which is quite fast and reliable at same time.
Note:-
This is not a paid post and views of my own
If this article provide some insights to you and also motivates to know more about Telco Cloud world and Google Cloud, then the motive is achieved.
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