How many of us spent this past year connecting to the world behind a screen? Working from home, keeping up to date on current events, streaming sporting events or learning online? The pandemic was a catalyst that highlighted the importance of networking in our society. While always important, it drove to the top of the agenda the mission critical need for us to stay connected.
Edge computing and cloud-native containerization will be an absolute necessity in the era of 5G where service providers will need to shift computing and communications from the core network and centralized cloud; to distributed capability across the edge. From a networking perspective true 5G infrastructure will create dramatic user benefits in cloud, data centers, robotics, artificial intelligence, remote medicine, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, smart cities and much more. But this comes at a cost.
Most emerging IoT applications will generate tremendous amount of data and extremely small amount of revenue per month. Installing 5G requires extreme amounts of upfront investments (CAPEX), not only in antennas but also in the backend servers, storage and networking switches required to support these apps. We must continue to drive efficiencies in day-to-day operations to improve profitability to support true 5G infrastructure build outs and not just marketing fluff that sells 5G but is based on older 4G packet cores.
#1: This is only the beginning - 5G infrastructure remains in its infancy
With the densification resulting from billions of connected devices, service providers need to eliminate latency and congestion problems, and improve overall application performance. The next generation of applications and services will be edge-native and focused on delivering higher value out of smaller infrastructure. Today, 5G is mainly targeting a single 5G New Radio (NR) access. In the future, the introduction of new mechanisms within a 5G Packet Core such as Segment Routing IPv6 and Access Gateway Function (AGF) - will lead toward a single infrastructure supporting multiple, fixed and mobile access types. Regardless of access type 5G Radio technology, Fixed Wireless Access or WiFi6 - all will be served from the same core infrastructure derived from 5G specifications. This will lead to many add-on benefits for subscribers, from increased security to new applications, all with improved user experience.
#2: 5G private networks will reign and network slicing will be critical for new revenue models
The focus of 5G will not be on the traditional smartphone user or public networks but private networks. For example, in large commercial buildings or large enterprises - we see private 5G networks being deployed, and large tenants in the building could be allocated their own virtual packet core infrastructure.
Industry 4.0 can also unlock immense savings through increased automation, agility, and resilience. 5G technology will enable next level machine-to-machine communication. Manufacturing will be all about connecting machines, so your manufacturing processes can react more quickly and intelligently to changing factory floor conditions. Managing this new data will prove problematic for unexperienced enterprises expecting to be able to export new sensor data to the cloud. Such companies could face challenges in terms of IT security, high cost, network latency, innovation capability, and system integration. A private 5G network could be a better alternative.
Network slicing will be a key benefit for service providers - whereby an edge data center can be partitioned by a Data Center Infrastructure Provider (DCIP) into multiple independent virtual data centers, with each virtual data center being provided its own virtual fabric called a “vFabric”. In this regard, slicing permits multiple operators and large enterprises to share, as Cloud Service Users (CSUs), a common distributed cloud infrastructure, with each CSU enjoying full isolation down to the hardware level for better security and a better quality of experience provided to the individual subscriber.
By Laurent Marchand,
CEO,
Kaloom
#3: Acceleration of cloud-native, open-source container-orchestration and intelligent programmable fabric
Containers or cloud-native, will continue to win over traditional Virtual Machines (VM) because they are more agile software packages that can perform small, well-defined tasks. Cloud-native is simply more cost effective. On the same physical server, service providers can run a much larger number of instances of the same application, a much larger number of connected devices and users than with a VM, all while using the same physical structure. While VM will not disappear, container-based architectures can better manage the new wave of emerging 5G applications and data. Red Hat OpenShift and VMWare ecosystems will continue to drive important developments in the coming year.
We will also see a trend to shift back to packet specialized chip sets that allow software to flexibly program hardware to add new functions - for example network slicing, load balancing and firewalling - in a way that was not possible before. This “top-down” approach, will continue to revolutionize the cloud-native environment. P4 Language, a higher-level programming language designed specifically to configure how a switch data plane will process and forward an IP packet, will allow us to make changes to a software environment without the added hardware costs. Making the whole stack, all the way down to the silicon, programmable - this will be a game changer in the way we think about network scalability and investment protection
#4: Automation will be critical and is essential to remain competitive
Essentially most Edge data centers will be completely automated and unmanned - and remotely managed from larger data centers. New solutions will need to be a heterogenous hardware environment - as traffic grows, latency also must be reduced. The need to have a natural operator to authenticate, configure, monitor, alarm and manage a system is imperative. This provides a means to improve service availability and reduce costs and complexity at the same time.
#5: No one vendor will do it alone and succeed
As service providers and enterprises rethink what ‘the edge’ means for their infrastructure, it will take a village to deliver optimized applications over optimized networks. We see that the forces of cloud-native containerization are gaining momentum, liberating computing workloads and enabling them to move closer to the end-user where network latency is lower.
The industry will benefit from the fact that networking has finally caught up with its server, storage, and application counterparts. Where a single execution platform like OpenShift will significantly reduce the complexity of deploying and managing distributed edge data centers.
Unified solutions for the edge will make it easier for end-users and engineers to deploy turnkey, pre-tested solutions.
There is a tremendous amount of work ahead to deploy the infrastructure necessary to handle the massive amounts of data that 5G enables. It is a fascinating time for networking and 5G. We may never go back to the way it used to be - working from home is here to stay. Thus, our tools and networks need to radically improve to be more efficient to meet this new environment's demands. The importance of networking will only increase, and the sad situation of a pandemic has been a catalyst for that.
We also need solutions that are an order of magnitude more cost efficient than what we have today. This means finding ways to reduce cost per connected device, cost per gigabit of traffic, labor costs - or the amount of people needed to run and manage these networks while at the same time reducing complexity. We are looking forward to this task and approach it with renewed focus and commitment after such a challenging year.
