This post was originally published on Light Reading
A funny thing happened during the pandemic: The giant cloud hyperscalers burst into the telecom industry.
And now it’s time for everyone to get acquainted with them.
Why? Well, it seems increasingly inevitable that a certain percentage – ranging from “a little” to “most” – of telecom operators’ network functions are going to run in some kind of cloud. Of course, that’s not necessarily a surprise: Operators and vendors have been working for more than a decade to replace proprietary boxes of hardware with virtualized bits of software that can run on top of regular, standardized computers. This shift has paved the way for network operators to at least consider the possibility of putting those little virtualized bits of software (“network functions” if you want to get formal) into a cloud computing environment.
But exactly what kind of cloud should operators use? Many have already built their own, mainly as a way to take advantage of the cost savings and flexibility involved in the shift to network function virtualization and software-defined networking.
Now, though, they’re facing the difficult and potentially expensive task of maintaining and expanding their cloud as network traffic
— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on Light Reading.
