[MUSIC]
Hi, everyone. I'm Jaione Pagazaurtundua
and I'm a Director of Solutions at Microsoft.
I'm Doug Benson.
I'm a Principal Product Manager for our private 5G Core.
Today, we're talking to you about
our new Azure Private 5G Core Service.
Enterprise are investing
heavily in digital transformation.
They seek to deliver improvements
to their operations to enable
the flexibility required to compete in today's market.
In 2021, about 10 percent
of enterprise generated data was
handled and processed outside of
the traditional centralized data center and Cloud.
By 2025, Gartner predicts that
that number will reach 75 percent.
In Microsoft, we believe that this data
will be handled directly at the customer premises,
the factories, the mines, the ports,
the airports to deliver reliability, security,
and performance required to handle
enterprise critical processes and large amounts of data.
The enterprise edge will combine IoT,
MEC, 5G,
AI, virtual reality,
and other applications to deliver real business value.
This is already starting today with over 1,000
private networks deployed worldwide,
a number that is estimated to grow to
over 16,000 by 2025.
Microsoft Private MEC brings together
the key components required
to build this enterprise solution.
It integrates a range of Microsoft and
third party services to
simplify the delivery of
secure private networks at the enterprise edge.
It offers a range of services pre integrated
into the Azure Cloud to make it easier
for our partners to deliver and
operate private network solutions at scale,
bringing down the cost to build
and operate these solutions.
The private MEC leverages existing Azure security tools,
edge platform options,
and Azure Network Function Manager to rapidly deploy
the infrastructure and connectivity
required for your applications.
It leverages the Azure partner ecosystem
to provide a range of radio and edge applications,
or you can bring your own applications to meet
the specific needs of your customers or your business.
All of it configured and monitored from the Azure Cloud,
managed through a single set of
Azure ARM APIs for Cloud automation and monitoring,
making it easy to replicate the same configuration,
manage multiple sites anywhere in the world.
Partners and customers are
also getting the reassurance that Microsoft is
continuously working to identify
the best and most relevant technology partners,
to increase the choice of components
within the private MEC solution.
Our aim is simplicity,
to enable you to quickly build secure,
flexible solutions at scale.
Today, we're announcing the new Azure Private 5G service,
which is a key service within
our private MEC solution portfolio.
It offers the ability to quickly deploy
a standard 5G mobile core to any Enterprise Edge.
This will enable operators any size to build
Edge solutions that leverage 4G and 5G connectivity,
in a faster and secure way,
orchestrated and configured from
the Azure Cloud and deployed at
customer sites across the world.
The Azure Private 5G Core service delivers
a complete set of containerized network functions,
giving you the ability to run
a full 5G mobile private network at the edge.
With support for 4G and 5G access,
you can enable all of the intelligence
and enhanced functionality of
a 5G standalone network or
connect to your existing 4G endpoints.
The service is packaged and delivered to
the edge from the Cloud,
with simplified configuration and
monitoring from the Azure Portal,
or you can simply integrate it to
your own IT systems using the Azure ARM APIs.
It is deployed with
Azure Kubernetes Service on Edge for simplicity,
which speeds up deployment
and provides high availability.
Once you have deployed the core,
then you can connect the radio of your choice,
bring in your SIMs,
or use one of our partners to provide you with SIMs,
configure the policies,
and activate the network.
That will show you,
in a minute, how quickly you
can create and activate a private network.
We have developed an OpenAPI
for secure SIM provisioning,
and we offer a RAN monitoring service
as a plug in to bring in
performance statistics from the radio
into a single pane of glass.
The service is built for the edge,
with high performing core,
with over 20 gigabits per
second throughput on a very small footprint,
which makes it ideal for
the enterprise edge deployments as it
maximizes the available compute
left to run applications,
as well as network services.
Azure Private 5G Core
will transform the enterprise edge and make
it easier to build
edge solutions that leverage 5G connectivity.
It simplifies the delivery of
high-performance 4G and 5G networks,
it speeds up the network deployment down to minutes,
it is scalable as it makes it easy to replicate and
manage multiple sites from the Azure Cloud globally,
it is secure with 5G and
Zero Trust as your enterprise architecture.
We know that security will be critical for the success of
private network solutions for enterprises to
trust that they can move their operations to 5G.
Microsoft is bringing together the mobile security,
defined by the 5G standards,
with the industry leading
Azure enterprise security framework.
Microsoft, as your Zero Trust architecture,
includes building capabilities to protect your solutions
against the many threats that exist today,
with security at every layer of your solution.
Strict compliance processes, monitoring analytics,
and a range of tools make
Microsoft the trusted partner for enterprises.
We believe that each enterprise has
its own challenges, environment,
and operational needs, and not one size fits all.
We have already a large ecosystem of partners that
have onboarded into our private MEC solution,
and the list will continue to
grow as we build more solutions,
and add more new applications, and technology partners.
We're already working with several operators NSIs,
which are building solutions with
our Azure private 5G core for customers today.
These channel partners will bring together
the different components of
the solution for the enterprise customers,
selecting the most suitable radio,
OSS, SIM supplier,
and applications to deliver
individual solutions quickly and securely with Azure.
That will now show you how easy it is to create and
deploy a 5G core
and configure the private network from Azure.
Thanks very much, Jaione.
We put a lot of effort into making
deployment of our private 5G core as simple,
scalable, and secure as possible.
The three steps here represent
the main activities involved
and what we'll show in a moment.
The first step is ordering,
setting up, and activating of the edge part from itself.
This includes activation of PMEC
into your particular Azure subscription,
ordering of the Azure Stack Edge platform
itself, cabling,
IP assignment of ports,
and initial software setup with Azure Kubernetes Service.
Finally, we activate an Azure Arc Connection,
which creates a conduit from
that edge solution back into Azure.
And the second step which we'll cover today,
we will use the Azure Cloud
to create a global configuration,
which can be used across multiple edge deployments.
This involves creation of a mobile network,
SIM provisioning, as well as policy.
Finally, once the platform is connected
and those global Azure parameters are set,
we can then securely push an entire edge site package
specific to that new location over the Arc connection.
Importantly, as Jaione mentioned,
we take advantage of
all available security and protection functions
found within Azure and extend
those layers of security all the way to the edge.
This ensures proper authorization, software scanning,
package validation, and platform protection,
ultimately delivering a secure 5G core.
Let's turn to the configuration of
the mobile network itself within Azure.
We use this well-known Azure ecosystem
to create our mobile network.
I'm showing this via the Azure portal.
However, ARM Templates, PowerShell,
and CLI can equally be used to
deploy in a more automated fashion.
The global parameters are entered for the mobile network,
and a variety of methods can be used at this point to
program and provision the SIM device information.
Once the mobile network is created,
we can see a summary of
both the global network parameters,
as well as the SIM entries and device types.
These entries will be used
later during deployment of this specific site.
The system comes with a default set of traffic policy,
but additional policy frameworks can be added to
provide differentiated and customized quality of service.
That policy is then assigned to specific entries.
Viewing the constructive policy,
we can see the linkage to
the network/data networks and any specific session type.
When clicking on a specific SIM entry,
we can see the assignment of policy
and what sites that SIM is associated with.
This assignment allows the SIM to operate at
multiple locations across the mobile network.
In cases where a device is stationary,
like an industrial robot or an IoT sensor,
the SIM can simply be assigned
exclusively to a particular location.
We show here an existing mobile network deployment
with four sites across the world.
The screen gives us
a quick status check of the deployment.
Here, we can create
a fifth site for this mobile network.
Here we provide specific information
for the new Edge location,
and we tie it to the existing mobile network,
SIM, and policy groups we've previously created.
This hierarchical type of
deployment is common to our implementation.
It's designed to both
reduce errors and scale up the solution.
During site creation, we connect to
this specific edge platform that we set up
in step 1 and we collect
the unique provision information
that's already found at that site.
This action ensures that we reduce
common errors around IP addressing,
and it streamlines that deployment process.
We also can enter here our preference on
whether this is a 4G or 5G network deployment.
Some radio parameters can be entered,
as well as setting options around data networks,
IP pools to use,
NAT configurations, and
any other site-specific information.
Importantly, the data entry is validated during
this creation process and to further
reduce errors and catch any misconfigurations.
After creating and deployment of that site,
we can then see a summary of the deployment
and validate that site activation was successful.
We then use the monitoring capabilities
available through Arc to
provide the customer or
the system integrator a single pane
of glass within Azure.
This provides the health of the applications,
resources of the site,
as well as the ability to monitor
device traffic loading in
any faults and events detected at each location.
This is all performed within Azure.
But we've also retained the ability to see
application detail via local Grafana dashboards,
and also the ability to monitor
specific devices
via our end-to-end call tracing solution.
This provides faster troubleshooting through
a unique ladder diagram for each UE call flow.
I hope this quick tour through
our deployment method has been
helpful and shows our commitment to delivering a simple,
scalable, and secure deployment of the private 5G core.
We're incredibly excited about
how our private MEC solution can provide
a critical role in the movement
to private wireless networks around the world.
We've worked really hard with
our technology partners to build out a full range of
capabilities that enable you to
address next generation enterprise solutions.
We'd like to invite you to come build with us,
see how easy it is to build a private MEC solution,
and add your own innovative solutions
to empower our customers. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. We hope you've
enjoyed our session and we look
forward to building some exciting 5G solutions with you.
[MUSIC]