Mavenir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have tightened their long-standing telecommunication collaboration to make it easier for operators to develop, test and deploy 5G and radio access network (RAN) cloud-native systems in an AWS public cloud environment.

The duo signed a five-year “strategic collaboration agreement” focused on using AWS services to architect Mavenir’s technology so that it’s easier to develop, test and deploy cloud-native applications in support of 5G, IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and RAN. Cited applications include enhanced dynamic autoscaling, automation and reliability to help operators deploy those systems on AWS.

The firms noted the new partnership “transcends technical collaboration and co-development and will also focus on accelerating market adoption.”

“We will also collaborate on joint market development – with clear targets set to accelerate market adoption, bringing the value and power of cloud-based network solutions to telcos and their customers across the globe, leveraging our combined market channels and customer reach,” Aniruddho Basu, EVP of emerging business and partnerships at Mavenir, added.

The new agreement builds on long-standing work between the two companies in the telecom space. This work has been most apparent as part of Dish Network’s cloud-based 5G network deployment.

However, that deep integration work has yet to convince most legacy operators to move more of their cloud-based 5G network components from their private clouds to a public cloud environment. There has been progress on moving some higher-level functions into these environments, but most operators remain averse to moving 5G core functions into the public cloud.

Andy Walker, global communications and media industry lead at Accenture, told SDxCentral in an interview that there is growing pressure on hyperscalers to bolster their cloud resources to support complex telecom networks, especially those that are made up of legacy components and architectures.

“It’s really easy if you don’t have life-or-death implications associated with your network to have great ideas, but the telcos do have to deal with very real life and death challenges and expectations that are placed upon them,” Walker noted of that challenge. “And to some degree they still have regulated utility structures in place around them. Yeah. Even as they are cloudify the network and doing all this neat and cool stuff they’re still subject to rules and regulations.”

Verizon, for instance, continues to run core 5G functions in its own Virtual Cloud Platform (virtual private cloud (VCP)). Adam Koeppe, SVP of network and technology planning at Verizon, told SDxCentral in an interview last year that while a cloud-native architecture allows for more dynamic network control, Verizon plans to maintain control over those network assets.

“Our goal from the start and still today has been we’re gonna have a network cloud that we run our core functions on; this is the network that faces the customers,” Koeppe said. “We are going to be responsible for that from beginning to end, the whole package. So placing those network functions on somebody else’s infrastructure, or cloud, is not even part of the equation.”

This mantra was echoed by rival AT&T executive Igal Elbaz, who told SDxCentral in a previous interview that “AT&T’s 5G mobility core runs on AT&T hardware in the AT&T data centers and operated by AT&T.”

While not specifically connected to a cloud system, AT&T’s network was hit by a multi-hour outage earlier this year that COO Jeff McElfresh said was “the incorrect application of a process.” That outage has drawn “discussions” with government regulators and Forrester Research noted in a blog post that the carrier could see up to $1.5 billion in costs associated with the outage.

Ishwar Parulkar, CTO for telecom and edge at AWS, told SDxCentral in an interview last year that work has shown the different challenges in running a telecommunications network compared to typical cloud workloads.

“Packet core is a different workload than the other workloads we are running,” Parulkur said. “We had to look at how we could improve our cloud networking, how we could enhance some of our performance required for packet processing to run networking workloads. And this is a journey we’ve been on. We have been on this path for the last two, three years in just making the cloud capable of running these workloads.”

He specifically noted that cloud relies heavily on compute and storage, with simple “networking as an enabler. … You know, one interface, one or two IPs, and so forth.”

But “with network workloads, [it] was the flip. Compute was very simple. If you look at the packet core, it’s a few instances and not a large amount of compute,” Parulkur explained. “But the networking was where the complexity was. We needed multiple network interfaces, we needed millions of IP [addresses] because a lot of devices connect to the system, so we had to reorient our thinking to building some of our infrastructure services to account for that.”

Despite the current hard line against running core 5G functions in a public cloud environment, Verizon’s Koeppe and AT&T’s Elbaz both did note there was a place for public cloud to be mixed into specific telecom environments.

“We’ll probably see scenarios where a multicloud environment comes into the picture and pretty much almost always tied to an enterprise need,” Koeppe said. “If you’ve got an enterprise customer that is trying to manage some of their applications or workloads on a private network, on a public network, whatever the case might be, we can facilitate that type of architecture as well.”

AT&T’s Elbaz said these sort of architectures also allow operators to better take advantage of tools and automation developed by hyperscalers.

“At the heart of this is how can we take advantage of the hyperscaler investment in tools, automation and cloud capabilities, because that’s their business and they are really good at it,” Elbaz said. “And knowing that this is how we are going to run the network going forward so why not take advantage of this.”

That investment is growing as hyperscalers look to gain more business in hosting telecom networks. A report last year from Dell’Oro Group forecast that hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) would be hosting 9% of 5G standalone (SA) workloads in their public cloud environments by 2027.

Chivas Nambiar, GM for AWS’s telco business unit, during a press briefing earlier this year said the hyperscaler was continuing to see steady progress in discussions with operators looking to tap into a hybrid cloud architecture, though those discussions are becoming more pointed.

“What we’re finding is a lot of this discussion is anchored around data and how do you protect the data, how do you protect access to the data,” Nambiar said. “Telcos who have worked with AWS in the past have a pretty deep understanding about how we protect their data. We don’t have access to it. Nobody else has access to it. It’s under the control of the operator themselves. They are obviously cautious about it because they’re … nationally critical infrastructure. But … where the use case merits it, they’re willing to move forward, and we’re willing to move fast.”

Nambiar added that he expects this work to accelerate as “intelligence needs to be driven into using this data to actually act on the network. There’s going to be this push for more of that work to happen in the cloud, and I think, fundamentally, more of these workloads are transitioning into the cloud then staying on-prem.”