Today’s wants make for tomorrow’s needs. The telco edge cloud platform as a paradigm fundamentally speaks to this motto.
A relatively new type of cloud computing architecture, edge cloud platforms, in the simplest of terms, provide a way to host applications and store and process data closer to the end-user. Centralized cloud, while all-pervasive and transformative, often falls short of the demands of the modern-day user, which revolve around extremely low latency, heightened security, and so on. By providing on-demand access to compute, storage and other resources at the edge of the network, with low footprint and hyper-automation, edge cloud platforms overcome this limitation and seamlessly deliver an enhanced and secure, content-rich performance that is required by many emerging business use cases.
Typically, edge cloud architecture benefits the next-generation of data-driven business models, related to retail, automotive, entertainment, manufacturing, healthcare, IoT, and so on, where data needs to be analyzed at the edge, latency is critical and size and speed of data transfer can become impediments. Many of these models are built on cloud-native platforms and tools and are sensitive to performance parameters that ultimately determine their user experience and market worth.
The other challenge besides latency is the availability of hardware and skilled resources at the edge, which makes low footprint and centralized hyper-automation imperatives to the edge cloud platform.
As operators embark on their 5G journey, network services must be delivered faster, with lower latency and at a far lower cost. This drives the modernization of network functions and disaggregation, softwarization and containerization of network service delivery. The future of cloud computing will be at the edge of the network where we will see a lot more sensors, device, and machines generating data. The need for an interconnected and multi-organizational edge cloud platform has never been more crucial, especially as we embark on the 5G journey and operators look to provide additional services beyond connectivity to the enterprises they serve. This need has pushed the telecom industry to undergo a major transformation. Traditional telecom network architecture that is rigid and monolithic is rapidly being replaced by a new one that is more intelligent, flexible and agile. This new network architecture, founded on the principles of cloud-native automation and orchestration, software-defined networking (SDN), Open APIs, and network functions virtualization (NFV), will allow operators to offer new edge cloud solutions in real time, with unmatched simplicity across multi-vendor networks. It will accelerate the rollout of services and deliver them to the end-user with low latency, security and high availability, at an affordable cost.
Rakuten Symphony’s SymworldTM Cloud is a cloud-native Kubernetes-powered platform that is designed from the ground up to support network service delivery extending the efficiency, scalability, and lower cost of cloud-native to network services, including RAN, Core and Edge, while offering a new level of agility, cost, automation and scale benefits. This cutting-edge telco edge cloud solution is purpose-built to deliver services at the edge for variety of use cases.
SymworldTM Cloud’s innovative orchestration and cloud-native platforms automate lifecycle operations and accelerate the deployment of network services from days to minutes at the core, edge and in the multi- and hybrid cloud. The offering allows operators to experience hyper-converged Kubernetes for the stateful edge at its best, enabling them to deploy applications as a service at the edge and simplify and future-proof their cloud-native transformation.
SymworldTM Cloud has solved the key challenges operators face at the edge in a live-production environment. It is already in production in Rakuten Mobile with millions of subscribers, and with proven benefits such as reduced CapEx, OpEx, and complexity of lifecycle management, accelerated 5G deployments, and delivering a significant number of new services in record time. Rakuten and other operators have validated the benefits of our cloud solutions, with Rakuten Mobile able to deploy the world's first end-to-end cloud-native, fully container-based 5G network at scale.
The success of SymworldTM Cloud is driven by the expertise and capability it has gained in the below critical areas:
SymworldTM Cloud consists of three key products:
Three principles are critical to ensuring the success of edge cloud for demanding use cases:
Edge service delivery presents new challenges to operators and enterprises. SymworldTM Cloud can solve such complexities – from time to market to design and delivery – of Stateful Edge applications at a reasonable cost.
Edge cloud platforms, like SymworldTM Cloud, enable data collection and processing closer to the end-user. They use analytics to deliver real-time insights that are actionable, besides contributing to an exceptional user experience. Automation and orchestration are critical components of the offering, using which operators can:
Interested to know more? Learn more about the challenges of the telco edge cloud and the approach telcos must take to become fully cloud-native. Click here.