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ANKUR JAIN: Hi, and welcome to the Google Cloud and Nokia
series on cloudification of telecom provider networks,
"Why Now and How?"
I'm Ankur Jain, head of engineering
for Google Cloud for telecommunication, Edge,
and container networking.
JITIN BHANDARI: I am Jitin Bhandari,
chief technology officer for Cloud
and network services at Nokia.
Let me just start up and paint a bit of a background
from a telco standpoint.
Over the last two decades, I must
say it's a little unfortunate that we
have built layers of complexity in our telco networks.
You see these WAVES of 3G, 4G, and now eventually we're
building 5G.
They are still reminiscent of fixed networks and layers
of complexity, both in the network's operations
and how we have constructed this network.
And here comes two vectors, 5G and Cloud.
5G promises value creation.
Before we create any value onto this 5G ecosystem,
we must simplify our networks.
And I can't think of a better tool like cloud-native.
I would love to hear your thought of how
the embracing of cloud-native comes to the hyperscale world,
with the broad landscape beyond telcos that GCP has onboarded.
What was your experience of cloud-native and how
cloud-native helped enable simplifications
from your perspective?
ANKUR JAIN: It's a good question, Jitin.
And quite honestly, this has been
sort of how we have always built our services
and built our network, whether it is our consumer
services, which we have several of those which
have more than a billion users, some of which
have a few billion users, as well as the underlying
infrastructure that supports all of these.
We've always built out these services in, if you may,
a cloud-native way, whether it is just making sure
that you're using microservices from a development cycle.
How are you ensuring that you are using microservices?
We are doing these regular automated testing
infrastructures.
We are rolling out these binaries
as well as config on a very regular basis.
We have the right mechanisms for caneering, rollback, et cetera.
And then, ensuring that we're getting
the telemetry we are getting.
We have the SRE practices.
We have these disaggregated platforms.
This is how we have built all of our infrastructure
over the years.
JITIN BHANDARI: I feel like this is homegrown for GCP.
I would like to first go on on our chapter
1 for Cloud-native, which is all about creating platform
agnostic networks and operations.
And this has been a challenge, because it's two-layered.
The movement of Cloud with far edges,
disaggregated Cloud, as we said.
And then the building of these workloads,
which we realized a few years back
that needs to be agnostic in any Cloud game plan,
if you want to give that degree of freedom and choice
of the platform.
Do you guys think the same way?
When you build these ecosystems of platforms,
do you see that degree of freedom
between the platform and the applications
as one telco operator may want to think about it?
ANKUR JAIN: In a setup where a larger ecosystem needs
to come together, which is the case in a telecom provider
network, 5G standards have actually
done a really good job.
In fact, there's a lot of great momentum right now happening
around opening up some of the interfaces around the LAN side.
So with these kinds of open specifications,
one can end up building out these kind of platform agnostic
systems that you are talking about, and creating
those sort of like the right abstraction layers
wherein you can put together these different building blocks
and still manage the complexity, back to your previous point,
and yet get the benefits of clarification,
get the benefits of disaggregation.
JITIN BHANDARI: So let's presume we
get successful in building applications that
are truly platform agnostic.
Use the right Cloud-native design principles, any Cloud
segregations, stateless architectures,
highly resilient scalable control plane, data plane,
and so on and so forth.
The second principles you were alluding to
is opening up the networks, the use cases in itself.
And you're absolutely right.
This time around, if you look at both the standards
and the specifications, the way we are opening up the networks,
whether accessing that mobility, that location,
that data plane, that policy embedded into the networks.
And not only that, APIs and SBA are service-based
architectures on the operations and creating
to the sliceable network, as what we call it in 5G,
is enormous.
One thing that I think we, as telcos community,
will need to come up together and understand
from that chapter, from the web-scalers,
is how do we create that marketplace?
What I mean by marketplace-- and let me elaborate on that.
We're doing a lot of ground-up work
right now with Nokia and some of the leading telco
operators as we are dusting off what I call it,
a ground-up building up of an API catalog,
cataloging applications, programmable interfaces
at networks level, at operations level,
and really giving the power to the end developer ecosystem.
But I must say that, as a telco industry,
we have struggled of creating that value.
We've seen that in the 4G era, two vectors, data and mobility.
There is still talks about telco missed on that value creation
bus.
This time around, we are more determined,
both for operators stand-up point of view.
If investment cycles of 5G has to be about value creation,
yes, we are simplifying the networks
using cloud-native principles.
Yes, we are opening up the networks with open APIs.
It all converges into the marketplace.
What's your viewpoint about that?
How do we approach this game differently this time around?
ANKUR JAIN: We're working with pretty much everyone
that you can think about, as you were mentioning, whether it
is the silicon players, whether it is, on the LAN side,
accelerators that you can think about, whether it is GPUs,
PPUs.
We have a very rich ecosystem around building.
And by the way, whenever I'm talking
about each of these components, if you may,
there's a rich software ecosystem
that is built around each of these,
with the clear specifications that have come up
with 5G standardization as well as
the ecosystem as it has now developed
around people actually implementing those open APIs.
The ability to now introduce a lot more openness
in the ecosystem has come in, definitely
to the advantage of our customers
and their eventual customers.
JITIN BHANDARI: I absolutely concur with that.
And I agree, some of the experiments
and some of the successful outings we have done recently,
say in the private network space or private wireless space
specifically for that use case, the amount
of WAVES of the ecosystem have come in from applications
from Nokia, and enabling on a specific radio capabilities
on a specific verticals like mining or health care
has been phenomenal.
So no, this is great.
Thank you, Ankur, for your insights,
and this has been a fun conversation.
ANKUR JAIN: Absolutely.
Thank you.
JITIN BHANDARI: Thanks for catching our discussion
on cloudification of networks.
We'll see you next time in the Cloud.
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