- Good morning. - Good morning.
- Thanks for joining us in the AWS Studio.
- Thanks for having me.
- Tell me a little bit about your role at Vodafone Business.
- Sure, so maybe I'll start with what Vodafone Business does
and then I can kind of show where I fit within that.
So, Vodafone Business serves three different segments
and we've just added a new one, which is developers,
but we also serve large corporates, multinationals.
We serve small and medium enterprises,
and we serve up to nine employees,
small and home office customers.
And we have two real missions in terms of what we do.
For the larger corporates,
look at bringing to life the applications
that are going to change the way businesses experience
the digital world.
And we do that by providing the next generation
infrastructure layer which sits at the intersection
of cloud, software defined networking, 5G.
And then on the SME champion or the SME side,
what we try to do is be the champion for SMEs across Europe.
So looking at how can we provide them
with the digital tools to transform,
so that they can compete,
just as if they were a large corporate as well.
And then my role within that,
is I run a portfolio of products that covers cloud,
edge computing, and mobile private networks.
- Wonderful, well, of course, today we're here to talk about
not just mobile edge computing or MEC,
but how you architect for that at scale.
How you're working with customers.
Does the developer ecosystem matter?
And if so, how? So much to impact today.
Let's start with, how do you see MEC?
How are you looking at the convergence of network and cloud?
What, what's your strategy for attacking that space?
- Yeah, so I am so excited to be in telco
at this particular moment in time,
because there is a massive transformation happening.
As you start to launch things like 5G
and our standalone core and software defined networking,
all of a sudden the networking layer
which used to be, you know, properly dig a hole, plug it in,
long lead time to provision a service,
it's now all going to be available on demand, as through APIs.
And therefore, like the difference between say,
a computing layer and a networking layer,
is completely converging.
And what we're just doing is providing another resource
to an application that is going to help it
optimize its performance on demand.
So seeing that all come together is really, really exciting.
And I think one of the way that translates
into my portfolio strategy,
is I kind of think about my portfolio as being,
how do you optimize the way applications work
across the cloud to edge continuum,
whether it's a mobile private network on campus
or our distributed edge or you know, the core cloud,
that continuum and taking advantage of that
and exposing that to customers, both the compute resources
and the network resources so that they can intelligently
optimize their applications across.
That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.
- Me as well when you think of it.
That continuum that you mentioned,
that's exactly how we describe it here,
the edge continuum.
We're meeting customers where they are today
with the infrastructure solution
that best meets their needs.
An AWS wavelength,
one such solution that brings that compute and storage
to the edge of telco networks,
the likes of Vodafone distributed MEC,
is incredibly powerful.
Let's define our terms here though.
What do we mean when we say Vodafone distributed MEC?
How does it work?
- Yeah, so Vodafone looked across
our entire footprint in Europe and said,
we believe that 35 milliseconds end to end
really matters for applications.
That's where your inner ear
starts to get really uncomfortable,
if there's more than 35 milliseconds
of latency in a mixed reality or, you know,
high definition cloud gaming service.
So we said, okay, how do we make sure
that any end point can get to the cloud
in 35 milliseconds or less?
And so we identified the strategic locations in our network.
We worked with AWS and have basically
packaged up access to AWS cloud through wavelength
in these strategic locations across our footprint.
So we've got two wavelength sites in the UK,
three in Germany, and I'm really excited to say,
we've just launched a pilot zone in Spain as well.
- Congratulations. - Thank you.
- Let's talk a little bit about the enterprise experience
with interacting with this infrastructure.
They're going to ask all about,
what's my cloud journey going to look like
now that I'm joining forces,
not just with AWS but with Vodafone as well.
Can you comment on that?
- Yeah, so one of the things that's really important,
I think to both of us,
is that we help customers figure that journey out.
So we've launched the edge innovation program,
so that customers can sign up and they get, you know,
support from AWS and support from Vodafone
to look at if you want to deliver this experience
to an end user on a device,
where do you need to run your workloads
to deliver the optimal experience?
And that probably isn't going to be
a wholesale lift and shift of your application
from AWS into wavelength.
We'll look at what workloads need to go into wavelength,
how you move them, how you adopt containers.
And then the thing that we were talking a lot about,
is the network APIs that can help you
optimize that experience as well.
So we've launched an edge discovery service,
so an application can query the network and say,
where is the compute resource
that is going to deliver the best experience for me?
And it'll direct you to the right wavelength zone.
So yeah, I think you'll start to see
that network and cloud
all feeling like resources
that the application can call on demand.
- I think that's an incredibly powerful experience
that developers are going to have finally interacting
with the network as an asset.
One thing that I love saying is,
I think it's finally now the time
where the network is an asset to application builders,
particularly with the advent of high speed 5G networks.
Is that the same message
that you're communicating to customers?
- Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And we've just launched our own developer marketplace
and engagement channel just for that,
to help developers discover and understand
how to use network resources.
And we've been talking a lot
about how to make that really easy for developers
and how to make sure that everything is consumable,
understandable, how do we abstract as much of the dark art
of networking and understanding that network for developers,
so it's super easy to use?
- So let's dive a little bit deeper
into a practical example.
I hear a rumor that there's going to be
some sort of guitar performance.
I'm a guitarist by trade, I'm highly curious.
How does this network API actually work in the wild?
- Yeah, so we have this fantastic company,
called Open Sesame,
who have an application called Sync Stage.
And in this particular demo,
we have gotten guitarists together,
together, virtually, one in the UK,
one in the US, and one in Canada.
And when they're ready to start their session,
the application, the Sync Stage application,
queries the network, okay, this guy's in London,
this guy's in the states, this guy's in Canada,
which MEC should they attach themselves to?
So then they can spin up
their own instance of the application,
but it's interconnected, the MECs are interconnected,
and then the Sync Stage application
provides the right buffer that sort of latent, sorry,
that jitter predictability for the application,
so that they can all be hearing each other
at exactly the right point.
So yeah, it's very exciting.
We'll have videos that we can push out
and you can see how it worked in practice,
five generations of music from the fifties to today,
running on 5G.
- So this example of integrating the network API
into one real tangible example
of reimagining the consumer experience
for enjoying and collaborating with music.
How does that align with your broader strategy
to engage developers as a whole?
- I think our broader strategy to engage developers
is to give them as much support as possible
to come into into the 5G MEC,
to explore it, to try it, to test it,
to make sure that that experience is optimized.
I would say we are open
to working with any kind of developer,
like a B2C developer, a B2B developer,
or even companies that might be just building services
that make the abstraction of the network in the cloud
easier for developers to consume.
- And I've got to imagine that the partner ecosystem
plays an ever critical role in this, just like Open Sesame.
- Yeah, absolutely.
We have our edge innovation program,
but we'll also be working with the 5G Future Forum,
which is the group that facilitated
this cool demo of the guitarist.
We are also launching
an ecosystem acceleration program through that.
So you can work actually with multiple telcos at once,
trying to simplify those APIs,
and making sure that those APIs are consistent,
regardless of what network you're operating in
and indeed in the future,
also while you're roaming and things like that.
So I'm super excited.
I think bringing more developers to experiment into the MEC,
is going to help us build better services
across the entire network, not just in the MEC,
but looking at how do we make sure we can optimize
the entire estate of what Vodafone does
and expose it to developers,
so they can get the most richness
out of the network that they can.
- One of the things we talk a lot about here at AWS
is the ability to go global in minutes.
And I think the interoperability of the network APIs
that are being created express precisely that,
that's what developers are asking for.
That's exactly what we need to deliver.
But if we zoom out for a second,
sure, you can build an application
for a global stage, just like Open Sesame is doing,
but what makes Vodafone distributed MEC unique?
- I think Vodafone is the first to have launched MEC
across multiple countries.
And Vodafone is a, you know,
very strong player in Europe.
And Europe is,
they're not small, but they are smaller geographically
in terms of countries, right?
So roaming and like passing from one country to another
is much more of a reality for us.
So we are really interested in making sure
that you can get that consistent quality of latency
anywhere that you go across Europe.
So we've been working with you
and the 5G FF and others
to look at how do we make sure that we can have
that kind of quality consistency across Europe?
And also even if you are in say, Germany and you are,
you know, in Munich and then you go up to Berlin,
how do we make sure that that workload
follows you to the right MEC?
And that really requires
a fantastic set of handshakes between AWS and Vodafone
to say, here's where the end point is,
here's when they're crossing over,
here's how we make sure that we orchestrate
the workloads to move across.
And all of those puzzles, I think,
have been a really unique way of working with Vodafone.
- And I know I'm super excited
about this unique architectural opportunity,
if I put on my solution architecture hat here for a second.
Got multi edge, multi-country, multi-region.
If I'm the developer, I'm like,
so what I'm deploying this all sorts of different times?
Do I have to manage this?
We think about the value proposition of AWS,
it's always about removing
the undifferentiated heavy lifting.
So I know we're doing some work with HashiCorp leaders
and infrastructure as code to really make life easier.
Anything you want to comment on that?
- Yeah, I mean, I think any way that we can,
I was talking about handshakes, right?
Like I feel like it's our job to build those handshakes,
so that it's completely abstracted for the developer.
All they need to know is that their application
is getting the right service with the right parameters
of let's say, bandwidth and latency and jitter.
They're getting that,
so that their application performs the best.
AWS and Vodafone and other telcos
that are working on the same set of APIs,
we can take that pain away,
to make sure that that set of handshakes
just happens in the background
without them worrying about it.
- One of the areas I'm most excited about
is collaborating developer to developer,
Vodafone and AWS together to make lives easier
for enterprises in managing these applications at scale.
We're looking at together things,
like service mesh technologies,
we're looking at how you can use
networking constructs within AWS,
to really abstract away that complexity
and super excited to continue working
with your teams on those challenges.
But zoom out for a second,
what are some other things you're excited about
for the developer ecosystem as a whole?
Whether it's exposing APIs,
creating a dedicated go-to-market motion,
how do you think about the weeks and months to come
from that perspective?
- Well, I think,
what you'll start to see is more and more APIs
in that roadmap being published and coming out
and just driving adoption, driving feedback,
making sure that these are easy to use
and consume for the end customers.
Within Vodafone,
we are continuing to drive our edge innovation program.
So we've got some really cool companies
that we're working with.
We're starting a pilot with Imperium Drive, which is remote.
They do, sort of remote driving, yeah?
So if you rent a car,
sometimes it can be a complete pain, right?
To like go to the rental car.
How do you get to the rental car?
Do you have to take a taxi to the rental car,
because obviously if you had a car to get there,
you wouldn't be renting the car.
So they actually are developing a technology
that will remotely drive that rental car to you.
So super, super cool pilot that will be running in the UK.
Very excited about that.
And you just introduced us to a fantastic company,
Confluent, and they are looking at bringing this,
the processing and the machine learning of data
closer to the device and the endpoints that need it.
So all sorts of things which honestly are good
for my edge portfolio, but also for mobile private networks.
Things like predictive maintenance, digital twins.
How do we make sure that all of those services are available
at the edge to our customers in a very simple way?
- So let's zoom out for a second.
One of our big themes this year is all about next level.
Talk to me about the next level
of distributed MEC in partnership with AWS.
- Oh wow.
So I think the next level of AWS MEC,
is you'll start to see more and more solutions
going from pilot into industrialized scale.
So looking at how we can drive and support our own customers
like Imperium Drive, for example,
to go from piloting on the MEC,
to actually being able to scale and productionize.
- Well, it's a fascinating discussion today.
Thanks so much for joining us in the studio.
- Thank you.
- Can't wait to continue working together.
- Excellent. Thank you.