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Legacy Radio Access Networks (RAN) were intentionally designed using closed and proprietary architectures that locked operators to a particular vendor, for both radio and supporting hardware (baseband units). Open RAN is a game-changing RAN evolution combining RAN functionality with cloud-native design, scale and automation.
Open RAN decouples software from hardware and moves the industry to a cloud-native model. The key functionality is provided by software known as Network Functions (NFs) that run on virtually any Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) server. The cloud-native model lends itself to, and has co-evolved with, workflow orchestration and network automation that can deploy, scale and heal without intervention. This is extremely beneficial for remote locations that have historically required expensive truck rolls.
In this model, everything is now just an application. Open RAN makes it easier to integrate and manage the infrastructure, with over-the-top (OTT), revenue-generating services found in modern Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) and cloud platforms.
Symcloud™ leverages GitOps – an operations framework that uses DevOps best practices used for application development, such as collaboration, security/policy compliance, versioning, and CI/CD tooling. We then apply this to our rich set of infrastructure automation features. Modern, containerized applications are optimized for speed and scale, but we need to go beyond that and bring those concepts to operations. Organizations with a strong DevOps culture are able to deploy code, in production, at scale on a daily basis. DevOps and CI/CD teams accomplish this through development best practices that are enabled by their infrastructure automation vendors.
Using GitOps principles, Symcloud™ automates the process of provisioning infrastructure. This is similar to how organizations use application source code, and operations teams that adopt GitOps use and manage infrastructure as code. GitOps files in detail the desired states of infrastructure and environment for every lifecycle event – build, test, deploy, scale, migrate, start, stop, clone and so on.
With Open RAN, the number of elements in the solution is set to grow by 100x, especially in highly populated areas. With this explosion of new service offerings above and beyond Open RAN NFs and services, it’s not about tackling a few key objectives anymore, but rather about automating everything in a new way that unifies and wields the solution as a whole.
To accomplish this, one must consider the following factors:
Symcloud Orchestrator provides complete Open RAN Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) for deploying and configuring 100,000s of Open RAN network elements without manual intervention. ZTP uses advanced design techniques of declarative policies that enable intent-driven, repeatable, full-stack, service onboarding, instantiation and lifecycle procedures, streamlining operations.
Bare Metal-a-a-S & LCM
Cluster LCM
Application LCM
Network Function LCM
Network Service LCM
Methods Of Procedures Management
Inventory Management
Symcloud Orchestrator supports the full stack automation of any workflow, including bare-metal provisioning, Kubernetes cloud platforms, NF lifecycle management, services lifecycle design, and executing Methods Of Procedures (MOPs) scripts. It enables large-scale management of any device or appliance – one-clicked automatically or triggered via our policy engine. It works seamlessly across containers, VMs and physical devices, simultaneously. We make it fast and easy to use with our custom service designer, MOPs Automation Studio and Orchestrator GUIs, where one can mix, match and reuse multiple workflow elements, as well as existing executors and scripts, simplifying it into one, contextually aware, unified workflow. In a single automated event, you can simultaneously prep the server, Kubernetes clusters, network devices, NFs and custom service chains.
Tasks that once took days, now take only minutes and we deploy all of this with a GitOps model.
In a large network operator’s environment, the scale of new site provisioning could cover over 1,000 sites per day. Via the Redfish Application Programmable Interface (API), we can configure numerous bare-metal components. All bare-metal servers are auto-discovered and all of the following actions can be performed in a single workflow: BIOS versioning, OS upgrades, configurations, FPGA updates, firmware updates and configurations, driver installation, BMC operations and any attached devices, including NICs, SSD, NVMe and RAID configs.
Once the bare-metal environment is set, Symcloud Orchestrator continues with the Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management. Operators can use it to manage clusters on any cloud, core, edge on a public hypers caler and so on, where each can have its own environment or Kubernetes distribution. Symcloud Orchestrator supports all major Kubernetes distributions and hyperscaler distributions, including K3s.
You can design and store multiple templated environments that cover the following:
Once your cluster is operational, use our automated and one-click NF and service automation. Every operation is easily automated and can be simply implemented, with easy-to-use policies, with our GUI (API and CLI also available). Where there is no expertise, hunting or hardcoding required, our solution finds the clusters, pods and nodes for you. You never need to be a CLI jockey, an expert coder or developer to operate it. All application lifecycles are policy automated with an App-Store-like look and feel. One-click and no-click for any lifecycle event – add, stop start, clone and scale.
Running VM-based Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) and Containerized Network Functions (CNF) on separate underlying platforms reduces resource utilization, adds operational cost and complexity and ties your modernization timelines to someone else’s roadmaps.
Symcloud Orchestrator and Platform run both VNFs and CNFs in the same cluster and even on the same pod, sharing resources in a common pool (or segregating it), while using the same onboarding and lifecycle operations procedures, allowing you to run more applications than before. This means no resource silos and zero operations silos as Symcloud Orchestrator manages them with the same commands. All you do is point it to the NF package and Symcloud™ does all the rest.
Provider’s NFs need more robust connectivity options, which also include high-performance underlays, to deliver the high-throughput, low-jitter services found in 5G applications. These additional networking requirements are not wholly addressed by most cloud platforms and include: per-pod Multi-IP Network Support, Open vSwitch underlays to extend corporate operations networks to NFs, SR-IOV underlay networks for high-throughput, low-jitter redundancy as well as NF interconnect, NIC bonding for redundancy and throughput, IPv4/v6 Support, IP Persistency, NUMA resource network mapping and Network-as-a-Service deployments.
A MOP is a generic term that describes a step-by-step sequence for performing any task. It tells technicians or automation tools how to execute the actions to perform that task. Our MOPs Automation Studio can be used to manage the lifecycle of physical devices, such as radios, sensors and networking appliances. This is performed by taking existing or new scripts and ingesting them into the MOPs workflow. MOPs can be executed in batch jobs or triggered by a policy engine that records the change of component states or receives a notification. Symcloud Orchestrator can send values to resident or remote Prometheus collectors that feed the policy engine.
With Symcloud Orchestrator, you can take any existing script “executors” and configs, and build complex functions from them. You can then take these functions and build additional multi-domain workflows. Then from the control center, you can validate and push out workflows at immense scale. This includes any physical or virtual elements. If it can be connected to, it can be managed as a whole, with the rest of the solution.
We can use MOPs to unify the non-Kubernetes, virtualized world with the rest of the solution and we can even use it to build network slices.
If a technician or a batch job wants to upgrade a top-of-rack (ToR) switch:
The key elements to using all of this data are access and correlation. Symworld Orchestrator accesses the physical resources and logical buckets based on numerous modeled variables. Use Symcloud™ metrics to gain visibility into the resources across multiple clusters and sites, for troubleshooting, automation and planning. See where each service is running, the resources and health status, and collect numerous performance metrics up and down the solution stack, from bare metal to services.
Symcloud™ has insight into all elements, including physical resources, cloud platform, NFs, services and energy management. It can correlate and display views across any strata from a full drill-down to a solution-wide view, including NF, application, service, pod, node, cluster, server, data center and multi-cloud. Using these metrics, you can customize and monitor at multiple levels – not just top-down or bottom-up. Based on this multi-level awareness, you can troubleshoot, auto-repair, migrate, notify or trigger a MOPs operation using a policy engine. Symcloud™ monitoring systems give you true everything-awareness and dependency correlation, as well as the tools to use it.
All monitoring, energy management, charging and planning functionalities are available on a per-tenant basis. Furthermore, the Symcloud™ solution provides rich RBAC functionality. Not only is there a three-level hierarchy in place, but virtually any operation can be mapped to specific users. Even users in the same privilege group can have access to a different set of operations. This is ideal for self-service and collaborative teams working in a multi-organizational environment
Symcloud Orchestrator enables you to deliver on the 5G promise with unmatched lifecycle simplicity, performance, scale, and advanced workload placement. By utilizing Symcloud Orchestrator, with its bare metal to services orchestration and the industry's most advanced cloud-native platform – Symcloud Platform – we enable:
Industry-leading orchestration, designed for both 5G and OTT applications:
A highly preferred cloud-native, Kubernetes-based platform that supports flexible networking options, VNFs/CNFs, application-aware storage and advanced multi-parameter, multi-cluster, workload and storage placement. Complex operations that once took days, take minutes.
Full solution stack, automated, multi-domain lifecycle management:
Full stack lifecycle management of the bare-metal HW, SW and cloud platforms, 3rd party appliances and CNF/VNF services chains.
Simplified deployment, flexible and high performing:
One-click onboarding, with an easy-to-use declarative model that scales, heals and migrates using autoconfigured, service-pinned policies.
Low footprint and high scalability:
Our solution scales down for the edge while retaining full functionality and scales to over 1,000,000 elements, with advanced features like network-wide monitoring, analytics and closed-loop automation.
