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Telco teams are challenged with the task of managing complex infrastructure, running highly tuned, Open RAN network functions (NFs) alongside additional revenue-generating stateful applications. They require on-demand agility, at immense scale, over a large set of diverse environments, while meeting the need to reduce operational costs. Additionally, they are tasked with migrating to containers, while supporting legacy Virtual Machines (VMs), not to mention full bare-metal to services automation and observability.
When solving for these customer needs, we, at Rakuten Symphony, consider not just what customers automate, but how they automate. Reducing complexity, time to outcome and how we dovetail into our customers' embedded base are also pertinent points to consider. We focus on reducing timelines across all tasks in a way that improves user experience and reduces the number of workflows needed to deploy and manage the Open RAN solution, and we do so in a way that simplifies application onboarding, service delivery and lifecycle management.
The GitOps approach is seen as the leading option for deploying and managing solutions and is ideal for Open RAN and stateful edge applications. The main principles of GitOps center on maintaining a repository with declarative descriptions of the desired solution state. It is then coupled with automated processes that rapidly assert those desired states to the production environment.
If one wants to deploy a new version of an NF, reconfigure a Kubernetes cluster or update existing hardware drivers, one only needs to update the repository and then the automated processes take care of everything else, in the precise ordering required – automated from Day 1 to as many days as needed. Symcloud Orchestrator orchestrates and manages the lifecycle of any workflow, including bare-metal provisioning, cloud platform instantiation, NF lifecycle management, network services (NS) lifecycle management and Methods Of Procedures (MOPs). All of these can be triggered through a policy engine.
Symcloud Orchestrator's automated workflows support cloud-native network functions (CNF), virtual network functions (VNF), 3rd party physical network functions (PNF) and appliances, simultaneously. All of this comes with full stack observability suite and planning tools. It manages your entire solution's stack with unified, context-aware, workflows. It can even import your existing executors and use them as part of any workflow, where domains can be actuated individually or combined into a single workflow. Tasks that once took days now take only a few minutes.
Rakuten Symphony's best-of-breed Kubernetes-based Symcloud Platform combines 1-click application onboarding with declarative, context-aware workload placement, pinning your applications and services to automated policies. It provides a fully declarative GUI that requires no expertise to operate or selfserve. This means a low/no-code experience, no hunting or hardcoding, that drastically reduces your time to outcome across, integration, training, application onboarding and lifecycle management.
Just tell Symcloud Platform what resources and supporting applications your service needs, and it will auto-discover and configure them for you, as per your policy, over the entire automated lifecycle of the service, providing all of the storage and IP address persistency needed.
Symcloud Platform enables CNFs and VNFs to share resources and operations constructs, eliminating operations siloes and reducing training costs. Furthermore, VNFs running on Symcloud Platform are customer-proven to run 30% faster when compared to other virtualization platforms. It enables organizations with developers and multi-use teams with integrated multitenancy, highly granular rolebased access (RBAC) and integrated chargeback capabilities.
Additionally, Symcloud comes complete with our full-solutions-stack “Sherlock” -a debugging and planning tool that greatly enhances availability and time to resolution and enables you to plan for those what-if scenarios.
Last but not least, while Symcloud Platform can scale up for huge clusters, it was built from the ground up with footprint in mind. Symcloud Platform maintains full functionality at the edge, unlike other solutions that sacrifice functionality, ease of use, operators and observability.
The big revenue options don't lie in connectivity, they lie in over the top services. With modern Open RAN, that means many of these new “stateful” edge services may be co-located in the edge and far edge centers with your RAN NFs or with the on-premises equipment you provide to your solution partners and enterprise users.
Symcloud Storage, included in Symcloud Platform, understands, auto-learns and auto adapts to all application, data, Kubernetes states and permutations needed for stateful applications. Backups, snapshots, cloning, DR and environment migrations are all application and Kubernetes state aware.
All data services are application-aware, tracking not only data storage, but the metadata and the ever changing Kubernetes application config, protecting a wide range of datasets for “application-consistent” disaster recovery of complex network- and storage-intensive stateful applications. Though vendors may claim Kubernetes-application awareness, they often require manually intensive tagging and marking over the lifetime. This is not the case with Symcloud Platform.
With Symcloud Platform, there is automated storage placement with affinity/anti-affinity, based on easyto-configure policies, along with IOPs-based storage QoS that eliminates noisy-neighbor issues and provides pre and post processing policies that auto-adjust to target environments and can even renumber IP addresses when cloning.
Lastly, what if not just your data was compromised, but your application too was hijacked? With a click of a button, we can clone the application + data, assert a security patch, and then reinstantiate your full service at any location.
Edge service delivery presents new challenges for operators and enterprises. Symcloud can solve these challenges for the end-to-end delivery of Stateful Edge applications at a reasonable cost:
