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TELCO CLOUD
Part 1 of 6: A Birds Eye View of Telco Cloud
A publication of
Black belt in training & consulting
This free guide provides an overview of the five parts that make up
Telco Cloud. And in the following five mini guides well explain each
part more in detail.
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What are those apps? Along the bottom of the picture you see examples, but
the list is not exhaustive. Its essentially every machine, server, router,
appliance whatever you want to call them that build up an operators
network. Anything that is usually drawn as a box with an acronym in it, and
lines going out of it, is most likely what we call an app. This is because they
are all really computer programs running in computers, connected to a
computer network. All of them.
If we build those apps so that they can run on any standard hardware that you
get at your favourite computer store, they can share the hardware. Imagine the
gain in only having to maintain one kind of hardware instead of specialized
hardware for every single node! Shared Hardware (1) is important in Telco
Cloud, and an important technology to achieve this is virtualization (learn more
about virtualization in the mini guide on Shared Hardware).
If I need to start one more app, what then? Maybe I have four PE routers
running, and realize that I need a fifth because the customer load is increasing?
As long as I have a little bit of that standard hardware to spare in my data
center, I can use it to start any app. They all run on the same hardware,
remember? Scaling the number of running apps up or down is called Rapid
Elasticity (2), because its almost like stretching a rubber band in and out.
So far everything has taken place in the same geographical location, the same
data center. But most operators have a number of data centers or PoPs (pointsof-presence). Perhaps that fifth PE router shouldnt be started in Stockholm but
in Paris? Or maybe the need was first seen in Stockholm but then the customer
behaviour changed so that the PE router would need to move! If the data
centers are joined in such a way that we get something near Complete
Network Connectivity (3), its easy to start apps wherever we want, or even
move them between geographical locations.
What would it actually mean to move that PE router from Stockholm to Paris?
The app has to be stopped in Stockholm, another instance has to be started up
in Paris, users may need to be handed over, data may need to be migrated
between the locations and new secure connections may need setting up. This is
not something the data centers themselves know how to do. In fact the
Stockholm data center doesnt really know any other data centers exist. It
does its job, runs its apps, processes data coming in, and sends it out. The move
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of an app has to be controlled from the outside with some sort of Central
Service Control (4). This is the place where the commands go out to stop and
start the apps, for instance.
But even this level of control is more detailed than we want our poor humans,
the operator employees, to have to deal with. Even if what really needs to be
done is all that stopping and starting, and migrating data, and setting up
security, it could also be described just by dragging the PE router from the
Stockholm part of an image to the Paris part. A simple drag-and-drop operation
in a graphical user interface suits us humans perfectly, while no humans work
in the actual Cloud control. No human interaction (5) between the
management system and the Cloud control is important to simplify and
automate complex operations.
is easy to maintain
contains fewer different platforms
makes it easy to move services around
enables easy scaling of a services capacity up or down
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In the following five mini guides, well put a little more meat on the
bones for each of these five aspects of Telco Cloud. They may also seem
vague, or almost magic sometimes, but if we break them down like we
did in this overview youll learn that they are not that complicated
either.
Abbreviations Guide
App
COTS
ETSI
GUI
HSS
MANO
MPLS
NFV
NFVI
OS
PDN
PE Router
PGW
PoP
SBC
SDN
SSD
Telco
VLAN
VM
VNF
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Application
Commercial off-the-shelf
European Telecommunications Standards Institute
Graphical User Interface
Home Subscriber Server
Management and Orchestration
Multi-Protocol Label Switching
Network Function Virtualization
NFV Infrastructure
Operating System
Packet Data Network
Provider Edge Router
PDN Gateway
Point-of-Presence
Session Border Controller
Software-Defined Networking
Solid-State Drive
Telecommunications
Virtual LAN
Virtual Machine
Virtual Network Function
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