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Rakuten Symphony's Edge Cloud enables operators, enterprises, and content providers to deploy and manage diverse, secure, cloud-computing capabilities at the network's edge. Stateful edge promises to be the key use case for 5G services that generate data and need low latency at the edge.
At Rakuten Symphony, we don't just consider what, but how customers automate. We focus on eliminating complexity and integrating efficiencies into our embedded base in a way that improves user experience, reduces operating timelines and the number of workflows to deploy and manage stateful edge services – by simplifying application onboarding and as-a-service solution delivery.
Centralized cloud, while pervasive and transformative, often falls short of the demands of the modern-day user. By providing ondemand access to compute, storage, and other resources at the edge of the network, with low footprint and hyperautomation, edge cloud platforms can seamlessly deliver the contentrich, highly performant services that are required by the emerging business use cases of our times. They can:
The big revenue opportunities don't just lie in connectivity, they lie in over the top services. With modern 5G, that is stateful edge services.
“Stateless” applications typically provide a single function, like a basic calculator that does not need to retain any information about a prior transaction or user, in order to perform the current transaction.
On the other hand, “stateful” applications, such as in the case of bank transactions and related analytics, care about pre-existing conditions or states. Therefore, it needs to have a persistent relationship with the data and its users as it scales, migrates, stops/starts and heals. Many new use cases are being developed that require stateful edge services, including smart cities, retail, transportation, industrial, and factory automation, that collect and process data at the edge.
The general edge-related challenges of scale-out, footprint, observability and lifecycle automation are well known. But, stateful applications pose more complexities, as they must provide persistent relationships between users, applications and their data.
Before Kubernetes, the relationships between data and applications was simple. There was a direct mapping between data and an application. But with Kubernetes, applications are broken up into many microservices and mapped to different containers, each with a different relationship to the data, as they grow, scale, migrate and heal.
To complicate the problem, most clouds are running off of their legacy storage, where Kubernetesapplications and their data are mapped to one another via a simple Container Storage Interface (CSI). That does nothing to address Kubernetes' application awareness. The unaware nature of the relationship limits efficiency and performance, and it also impacts how one can configure the combined solution for data protection, workload-to-storage affinities and lifecycle automation.
Symcloud Storage, included in Symcloud Platform, understands, auto-learns and auto-adapts to all application- and data-related Kubernetes states and permutations. 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 also the metadata and the everchanging Kubernetes application config, protecting a wide range of datasets for application-consistent disaster recovery of complex network- and storage-intensive stateful applications.
Vendors who claim Kubernetes application awareness most often require manual and intensive tagging and marking over the lifetime of applications. This is not the case with Symcloud Platform. With Symcloud Platform, there is automated storage placement with affinity/anti-affinity, based on easy-to-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 if your entire application was hijacked? What if with the click of a button, you could roll back your entire application/service, plus any state of the data, to a previous state? Symcloud Platform does all that and more. Furthermore, you could clone the application, assert a security patch, and then reinstantiate the full service in no time!
Symcloud Orchestrator orchestrates and manages the lifecycle of any workflow including, bare-metal provisioning, cloud platform instantiation, network functions (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.
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 self-serve. This means a low/no-code experience, no hunting or hardcoding, which 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 autodiscover 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, was built from the ground up not only to scale up but also deliver all of its great features, even when its footprint is scaled way down at the edge. In other words, it does not compromise on functionality to be edge-efficient.
Stateful edge service delivery presents new challenges for operators and enterprises. Symcloud can solve these challenges in the following ways:
