Episode-I Open 5G HyperCore
Authors: Fatih Nar Chief Architect, Ishu Verma Emerging Technology Evangelist at Red Hat
Introduction
It’s becoming a cliche to say that communications service providers have enormous business opportunities and technical challenges with building and delivering 5G service offerings with hyperscaler (i.e. public cloud service providers) infrastructures. Most of the major communication service providers have already announced or are work-in-progress to bring a 5G solution that combines their on-premise infrastructure with commoditized cloud computing. While there are common elements, by and large, each service provider is pursuing their own unique approach in creating the 5G solution with their choice of partner ecosystem including cloud infrastructure provider(s). There is a real world true need to build an open 5G solution blueprint, that leverages the common solution elements and open source technologies, and can work across any (+multi) hyperscaler infrastructure. The ultimate goal is to make 5G available, accessible and affordable for consumers with consistent best in class user experience.
This article is a first in the series about how to architect an open 5G solution built with open source technologies at core, that can work across any hyperscaler. We’ll delve into details of this solution through an architecture blueprint blog series.
Why 5G with Cloud?
5G adoption rates continue to vary across the various 5G catalog offerings: FWA (fixed wireless access) for consumers/businesses, edge deployments for latency sensitive applications, dedicated infrastructure offerings to enterprises via network slicing etc. The full catalog of 5G offerings is not yet available and/or accessible to consumers, depending on their geographic locations, and is not even affordable. To expand 5G coverage for an increasing consumer base, communication service providers need to see/able-to-calculate return of investment (ROI) for the new capital (capex) investment (to acquire, deliver and build), as well as keep it running i.e. operational expenditures (opex). This places a significant financial burden on the service providers.
Telco service providers need an adaptable, on-demand and pay-as-they-consume infrastructure services from 5G Core to Enterprise/Consumer Network Edge and even towards 5G RAN (radio access network) that can deliver across diverse use cases with minimal capex and opex. Satisfying these use cases requires a value chain consisting of cloud native technologies, complementary service capabilities, creative business model capabilities, and extensive partner ecosystem. It also requires talented & empowered engineering teams that can quickly create solution prototypes and evolve them to mature production implementations and support the complete end to end solution.
Coincidentally, communication service provider’s own digital transformation (e.g. cost and service transformation) will also require some of these same ingredients. As with all new technology offerings, some of the use cases are not likely bullet proof business opportunities but a leap of faith approaches to untouched business areas where risk factors cannot simply be ignored.
Open source software has been driving the business and technology transformation for communication service providers into a digital service provider for quite some time and we have witnessed significant success stories with increasing business agility, adaptability to constantly changing business needs/environment while lowering the cost. The flexibility provided by open source software allows communication operators to mix and match on-premise infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure, all monitored and managed through a single pane of glass with an abstracted API layer. 5G solution with hyperscalers allows dynamic scaling to meet the demand based on time, location as well as adaptive cost vs earning changes. Cloud native technology enables operators to adopt consumption based geo-distributed technology stack implementations on cloud infrastructures, leveraging automation towards minimal risk and wider customer coverage.
Logical Solution View
Conceptually, the 5G solution stack can be categorized into: infrastructure, application platform, 5G applications and management & orchestration. Infrastructure provides necessary compute, network and storage resources to the application platform. Application platform accommodates the applications with declarative desired state consistency with facilities to perform scaling, healing and monitoring. Applications provides the business logic they are aimed to deliver in a homogenous performant way (ie wider, stronger, faster 5G). Management and orchestration allows dynamic scaling of end-to-end 5G solution, across multiple locations with automation.
Note: These elements presented hereby are the generic common architectural elements for conceptual guidance.
5G Open HyperCore Technology Stack
/Infrastructure
These are services and resources provided by the cloud service provider. These include core services like; compute , network , storage , infrastructure sub-utilities (ex ntp source), additive network functions (ex firewall / load balancers etc) as well as add-on software services such as identity management, infrastructure automation toolbox and base image catalogs.
Although each hyperscaler offers similar stacks with equivalent components, their allowed access methodology , i.e. application programming interface (API), varies among them. This variance brings overhead to the 5G engineering team to keep up with and manage different stacks with continuously changing catalogs and cost variations. However the application platform installers and management toolboxes can hide this complexity by introducing infrastructure agnosticism.
/Application platform
Application platform is the core “engine” that runs (i.e. accommodates) the 5G application/function stack. The key components provided such as; container execution and orchestration platform, application sub-utilities (dashboards, apis, pluggable resources etc) , additive devops and platform-management toolboxes. Application platform is not necessarily a singleton instance but a distributed highly available, resilient open source software stack.
/Applications
5G applications can be subcategorized into ;
- Main functions that deliver 3GPP 5G Core functionality for device/user registration and session management.
- Supplementary functions that deliver device/user subscription and value added services.
- Management function(s) deliver operations support system (oss) and business support systems (bss) duties.
All of which can/should span various/multiple application platforms for resilience and higher availability.
/Platform Management & Application Orchestration
By the nature of communication solutions, the availability of 5G Core can be enhanced with multi-location deployment as well as location aware access enablement to allow dynamic resource allocation and management. In order to achieve this goal, multiple platform instances will be required to host 5G application stacks. The best practice, to achieve smooth and consistent platform creation, management as well as application stack delivery, is leveraging the GitOps pattern. Using git as a single source of truth, both for platform configurations as well as application/function stacks, is the only way to achieve homogeneous and scalable 5G Core across on-premise and hyperscalers.
Next Episode
This was just a pilot episode for the overview of the common generic elements that make up the 5G Open HyperCore architecture blueprint in logical level.
Next in this series, we will be taking a more detailed look at interaction between various 5G HyperCore solution components that will allow to adapt and distribute/place them for each business requirements perspective as well scaling the open 5G Core on-demand, thanks to hyperscalers on-demand available resources at use of gitops pipelines. We will also unbox the gitops for 5G and see how a pattern can heal broken wings of the network operations team.
