The importance of cloud-native core services in a Telco World, Carsten Bock

The importance of cloud-native core services in a Telco World. Carsten Bock, Managing Director CTO, ng-voice GmbH

I’m delighted Carsten is able to join us at TADSummit. Carsten’s son was born 5 years ago, while he was attending TADSummit 2015 in Lisbon. His son arrived 12 weeks early! Needless to say he had to hurry back home.

Carsten also presented at TADHack-mini London in April 2015 on “Kamailio Open Source VoLTE” this demo helped him win some deals and build ng-voice into the thriving business it is today. His demo video has been viewed 650 times!

Now, back to the focus of this weblog 🙂 ng-voice started back in 2011 as a group of open source VoIP pioneers, their initial focus was VoLTE, see “Kamailio Open Source VoLTE”  demo Carsten gave in 2015. Today they are a full 4G/ 5G cloud supplier for telcos and private LTE networks.

Carsten provides and excellent review of the current situation facing telcos and the trend towards cloud. With some useful quantification on the benefits of containerization.

This presentation aligns well with the thought-leadership by Manuel Pombo “Adventures in Real-Time Communications in the Cloud“;  Grzegorz Sikora “Cloud Native Function for 5G success“; and the excellent panel discussion on “Serverless and RTC“.

The two deployment examples Carsten reviews of scaling voice and HSS (Home Subscriber Server) are very interesting. Highlighting the importance of DevOps, the challenges with voice, and making the case for why you need to scale each interface of a HSS independently (micro-services). Which is all backed up by ng-voices extensive IMS core deployment experiences.

Carsten is making the benefits of cloud native we heard from leaders like GoContact and Simwood available to all telcos today.

Slideshare is having difficulties today, here’s a direct link to Carsten’s slides.

Agenda Description

We all know the telco industry is facing several challenges: Exploding data usage driven for example by video streaming, new competitors entering the market like WhatsApp, offering voice services for free, 3G networks are getting decommissioned. All of these developments increase the pressure on operators to reduce costs while still investing in innovative infrastructure solutions. Furthermore, IoT has turned from a buzzword into a reality, becoming more relevant each day, forcing operators to offer connectivity at a fraction of costs compared to traditional voice and data.

Many of these new services such as WhatsApp, Zoom or NetFlix utilize the cloud at it’s best, possible way, allowing them to offer their services at a fraction of the price traditional Telecom players would charge their customers. The Telco Industry needs to learn from them and take advantage of innovative infrastructure solutions to compete in this new industry dynamics.

Building cloud-native core services is much more than running existing services on virtual machines. It’s about utilizing the cloud in the most effective way, which for example allows you to scale the services on demand as requested by your subscribers rather than to rely on inaccurate usage forecasts.

In this talk, I will walk you through the key principles of cloud native services and how we apply them in the Telco world, focusing on both the benefits they bring to the operations of Telecom-Infrastructure, and the challenges of deploying Telco-Services as cloud-native infrastructure.

Carsten Bock

2 thoughts on “The importance of cloud-native core services in a Telco World, Carsten Bock”

  1. Thank you for an excellent presentation Carsten. Given all the functions a telco can migrate to cloud-native. Which specific functions would you recommend a telco start with and why?

    1. Hi,
      As a developer, I would start with simple and obvious elements, such as OSS/BSS systems. I would then go for network applications (e.g. HSS/HLR/AUSF and IMS) and finally the network core.
      From a business perspective, I would start with those services, which are distributed unevenly across the day (e.g. Voice-platforms), as they provide the biggest benefits.
      Thanks,
      Carsten

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