As the industry moves into the next phases of the 5G rollout, edge services will become a driving force to significant incremental revenue opportunities above and beyond connectivity alone.
Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) offers operators cloud-computing capabilities at the edge of the network. This low latency, high bandwidth environment with real-time access to radio network backbone is driving innovation and multiplying the opportunities possible with efficient services delivery. This is where operators can realize significant growth and return on investment.
Edge computing capabilities will enhance the users’ overall Quality of Experience (QoE), that ultimately leads to the success or high value applications at the edge. Edge solutions will be tightly coupled with the 5G Radio Access Networks (RAN), and in many cases, collocated in the Mobile Network Operator’s (MNO) edge data centers.
What will edge computing services provide?
With key technologies like Autonomous X, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), Video Analytics, operations and gaming and Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos thriving on the high bandwidth, low latency nature of 5G – the potential for revenue growth is more significant than ever before. When you consider the number of industries being revolutionized by the Internet of Things (IoT), such as energy, agriculture, smart cities, and logistics – the far-reaching implications of low latency, super-fast 5G connections are clear.
Key MEC and Edge Challenges
Edge and MEC solutions are inherently open and multi-vendor, which adds additional interoperability concerns into the mix. Common challenges include overall service orchestration to a modern, highly scalable, Kubernetes platform that harmonizes VMs and containers, eliminating both resource and operations silos. This considered, operators will want to focus on unifying lifecycle automation workflows across multiple domains, up and down the hardware, software and operations stack. Digging deeper, Network Function and application performance tuning, and life cycle management on Consumer Off the Shelf (COTS) hardware is critical, as low latency performance is one of the main pillars found in edge computing. Lastly, multitenancy, roles-based access, and chargeback in both dedicated and shared environments is critical to effectively segregate, share, secure and tune among workloads.
Choosing Cloud-native Platforms and Bare Metal to Services Orchestration Solutions
The lynchpin of a highly distributed Edge Service delivery network centers around the central points that manages everything, the cloud-native Kubernetes platforms that run services and the automation or orchestration systems that bind them together. Kubernetes has been dubbed the secret weapon for unlocking cloud-native potential, with autoscaling and autohealing abilities that can greatly improve reliability for any application.
According to the 2021 Kubernetes Adoption Report, 68% of IT professionals increased their Kubernetes use due to the pandemic, and Kubernetes appears primed to grow in adoption in the coming years. Thanks to Kubernetes’ ability to offer operators a competitive edge, Rakuten became the industry’s first telecom operator to deliver a 100% cloud-native architecture which is being leveraged in a multi-vendor, end to end 5G rollout.
When moving from the test lab to deployment and massive scale-out of 5G services, it will eventually become evident that how you automate is just as important as what you automate. While vendors and analysts praise the benefits of the cloud automation revolution, it is not a simple cure-all for any repetitive or scale-out task. There is more to making 5G services a success at a scale.
Automated cloud platforms and orchestration solutions have significant comparative benefits and choosing these platforms must be done with great care as they impact time to outcome, resource utilization, solution costs, and opportunities. When choosing cloud native platform and orchestration tools, it is important to dig deep into the functionality and ease of use as this will ultimately dictate an operator’s success over the lifecycle of its services.
Meeting 5G expectations, while remaining future ready
Because 5G promises to support 10,000 times more network traffic, 10 times faster than its preceding network generation, with one fifteenth of the latency – consumer expectations for 5G are sky high.
Kubernetes platforms enable MEC and RAN environments to become more automated, flexible, and cost effective in a way that will see increased operational efficiency now, and as the industry continues to evolve. To reap these benefits, cloud platforms and orchestration tools must have the flexibility to unify RAN and Core, along with MEC services across multiple generations and locations, with unprecedented ease of use.
Edge applications enable operators the ability to deliver on this promise, by hosting virtual application environments and dynamically engineering service delivery. Cloud native, Kubernetes platforms and advanced orchestration tools are empowering this service delivery in a way that improves operational efficiency, costs, and agility, as well infrastructure utilization.
Implementation of the right cloud native platform has the potential for a 40% reduction in OpEx scalable orchestration & automation services and have been customer proven to reduce many scale-out tasks from weeks to minutes, while reducing CapEx by 50% by enabling all of this on off the shelf hardware.
