The Evolution of Public Cloud to Support Telco Network Functions

Over recent years, the technology used by network operators to build network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructure has evolved successfully to address the mission of NFV, replacing physical network appliances with virtual ones. But network operators have learned that building and operating this kind of NFV infrastructure is difficult and costly and that the right mission for the softwarization of their networks is not virtualization but cloudification. As both operators and their vendors embrace cloud-native approaches to building and operationalizing carrier-grade network functions, the telco industry finds itself moving into alignment with the wider software world— embracing public hyperscale cloud as the natural home for most workloads. 

There is no question that network function workloads are unusually demanding. Traditionally, network operators have responded to the needs of their network function with purpose-built private cloud infrastructure. But public hyperscale cloud has been evolving quickly and is now more than capable of hosting the great majority of network function workloads. Operators now have a genuine choice between continuing to build, operate, and evolve their own infrastructures for network function workloads, and offloading responsibility for the infrastructure to public hyperscale cloud operators that bring enormous economies of scale to bear.