Hi everyone, and welcome to this AWS breakout session.
My name is Mohit Gupta.
I lead the product management for AWS Wavelength.
AWS Wavelength is the mobile edge compute
which resides within the 5G network.
And today we're going to talk about how AWS Wavelength
is combining with network API
and helping the next generation of applications.
I have an illustrious panel here with me so without much ado,
let's dive in and get a quick round of introduction.
So customer first, let's start with you, Antonio.
Why don’t you tell about yourself, your company, and the project.
What is exciting about this?
Well, at CINFO we are a company specialized in video technology
for telcos, media, sports, public administration industries.
Our specific job is to apply artificial intelligence
to live video inputs that we receive from the field.
We perform automatically with production.
And that means that we have to manage
the reception of video
analyzing and then return commands to the field in a very quick response time.
We have cloud nodes in Europe, in Asia, in America, so all over AWS
infrastructure.
And when Telefónica offers us the opportunity
to jump into this project to accelerate the performance of the system, we jump.
I'm very excited.
Great.
Thank you so much. Over to you, David.
So I'm David del Val.
I am responsible for the Open Gateway project at Telefónica.
Open Gateway is an industry wide initiative of all the telcos in the world
to expose our capabilities, network capabilities, using APIs
so that developers such as CINFO can take advantage
of, you know, how to control the network.
So one of the main APIs
that CINFO is using through AWS is the Quality On-Demand
API that enables them to transmit the video to the wavelength
in a very controlled manner and with very high quality.
That’s great.
Over to you, Jaime.
Hello, my name is Jaime Diez.
I'm the Head of Engineering
for mobile private networks and its computing at Vodaphone Business.
And what we have launched with AWS are couple of countries, UK and Germany,
and we are working on a few more that soon will be public.
And to me, specifically, I'm very pleased to see how we are
helping customers to the use cases that we are unveiling within.
And as a software engineer,
the fact that we are removing barriers to leverage the network and compute.
So very happy to be here.
Awesome, thank you.
And finally, Asif. Hi, my name is Asif.
I lead engineering for Wavelength Network APIs as a special project, and I worked
with Antonio’s team, David's team, and Jaime’s team to get this pilot going.
So why don't we start with you, David.
So we have been within the telco community,
have been talking about exposure of network capabilities.
So what is special now?
What has changed?
Why are we so excited this time?
Well, first of all, we have 5G, which we didn't before. And 5G
was designed from the ground up to enable more speed, less latency,
but also more ease of exposing capabilities.
We have the network exposure function in 5G
that kind of takes all the complexity and exposes,
to software developers, the capabilities of 5G.
And on top of that, we are building another abstraction layer
that makes it really easy for developers with one single line of code,
as we say, to actually get to these capabilities.
So first this, you know, the basic capability of 5G
and the ability to expose it in a very simple way.
Secondly, we have all the telcos on board.
We have 20 telcos right now that have signed an agreement among us
to all collaborate and have the same APIs
exposed to developers, so that developers don't go crazy
just developing for Telefónica, for Vodafone, Vodafone
and Telefonica will have exactly the same APIs.
And I think that's that's very remarkable.
And third,
we are collaborating with you guys, with AWS, you have this
fantastic developer ecosystem—developers are used to your environment
and that's where
we want to expose this API so that they find them and they say, “Oh,
I can control the network, let's try it.” That's great.
Yeah, that's great.
So Asif, what is the importance of network API to AWS?
How does it matter?
That's a great question, Mohit.
I think when you look at applications and user experiences right now
in 2023, users want that seamless enhanced user experience
that they get used to in, the people who grew up in the mobile age,
and network APIs allows us that quality of service, quality
on demand to hand it to the app developers so when I open an application,
when I'm using an application, I get that consistency over the radio,
that Telefónica provides or a telco will provide
and the guarantee of the backbone that AWS provides.
And you also land in the closest Wavelength zone.
So you're optimizing on multiple factors on the radio,
on location, and also on the backbone.
So it really allows for that superlative experience to get to end users
who are playing games or in this case video streaming
and also the developer experience that David touched on.
How do we make this super, super simple and consumable
by app developers that they can just, with one line of code, get this going?
So I think network APIs is a real game changer in
how we will experience our applications as we move on
with a much higher user experience and really great experience.
Great, that's that's really wonderful to know.
So back to Antonio then.
Based on this collaboration that AWS and Telefónica did for that project
that we we now have a proof point of how we were able to improve the experience.
What does it mean from a business perspective to you?
How does it help you in your business?
For us it's all important.
We are actually, CINFO is, a spinoff of a telco company.
We design our products for a world where 5G is widespread or fiber is widespread.
In the pastl
we tested to deploy
our technology on the edge computing on several telco infrastructure,
but it was very complicated, a nightmare—security problems, firewalls,
even connectivity from the outside world to the edge.
So in this project we have
the best of both worlds.
We have all the investment, we have executed to integrate with AWS
and to be able to be elastic and quick on reaction time.
In a given weekend we can raise 200 machines, 300 machines
to serve our customers.
And then we have the other world, the APIs of the network
and the aim and the capacity to control the quality of the service
or to demand from the network a better service.
So for us, or for me, I expect easiness of the scale.
I can now launch this application in Asia,
if there is a telco data center from you guys
with the capacity of having good quality on that area,
which in a sense, would be impossible for me to reach that telco operator
and to make an agreement with each of one individually.
So for us, it’s a big opportunity for scaling.
That's that's great to hear.
So back to you,
Jaime, you as Vodafone has been our longstanding partner on Wavelength.
So we are coming making strides now.
How do you see what do you think we should do to make this
collaboration even faster, more innovative?
What are your thoughts on that?
I think we need to continue on the on this same alliance.
From a technology perspective, continue to combine the power of 5G
and Wavelength and combining that network and compute
removing barriers and removing friction.
Then continue to create awareness for both customers
that perhaps in the past didn't have a good experience
and they have forgot about the possibility of actually doing something
and then offering to them.
Also awareness with developers that perhaps are not aware of how easy
for them it is now to tap into the network and into compute as previously.
And then thirdly, I think continue expanding our footprint.
Today we are in UK and Germany,
but we really want to make this totally ubiquitous as our networks are.
And we want to make it available for all the developers and customers out there.
That's a great insight that all of you provided.
It's really interesting to listen to all the perspectives.
So I guess the key takeaway which I get from this is three points.
One, we need to innovate, bring the best of both worlds,
as you said, Antonio, of bringing the compute,
all the amazing cloud services along with
now the programmability of the 5G network and combining it together.
The second thing which I heard was simplifying the experience.
How can we make sure that the developer don't have to spend time and energy
in actually building, deploying and getting to the APIs,
getting through all the constructs, but a simple experience for them.
And third, most importantly, how can we scale, as I said, I mean,
how can we scale it beyond just one country globally?
Have you reached all your customers around the globe?
So thank you so much. This is really exciting.
Really looking forward to working with all of you on next exciting projects.
Thank you. Thank you.