Since the debut of the iPhone in 2007, data traffic over AT&T's network has increased 100,000 percent, straining the company's sprawling infrastructure to the limits.

The solution? "Midget cattle," in the words of Toby Ford, AT&T's area vice president for cloud technology strategy. He used the familiar pets-versus-cattle analogy to describe the company's Domain 2.0 strategy, comparing legacy network equipment to beloved house cats and software-driven commodity hardware to miniature cows in an address at NFV World Congress 2015 in San Jose on Thursday.

The "midget" part comes from the fact that virtualized functions aren't supposed to be huge like cattle. "If VNFs have 24 cores and take up all the memory of a host, that doesn't count" as a "cloudified" application, he said.

The selective vendor list for Domain 2.0, in which AT&T consciously sought a wider base of suppliers, is now well known, with spots highly coveted as AT&T cuts its annual capital spending by a projected $3 billion this year. One result of Domain 2.0 was the carrier's User-Defined Network Cloud, launched in February of last year

Ford's candid remarks offered a window into the "why" and the "how" of the ambitious Domain 2.0 project.

"The cloud providers are yanking us, despite ourselves, into this future — they're the ones that are driving this growth," said Ford, acknowledging the threat that cloud giants like Google and Amazon pose to legacy telcos. "I would argue that they're very similar to us when you strip away the function."

In fact, the function also looks more and more identical, with Google in April launching its own mobile network service. Experts believe the service, called Project Fi, aims to use the search giant's powerful in-house network capabilities in an end-run around legacy providers, allowing Google to serve up content — and revenue-generating ads — directly to its users. (Sprint and T-Mobile are partners in the pilot project.)

"I believe that you could make a telecom that could manage the networking aspect of what we do with an enormously smaller number of people," said Ford. AT&T had more than 243,000 employees at last count.

AT&T's Toby Ford at NFV World Congress 2015

Problem is, AT&T isn't making a new telco from scratch. On the challenge of overhauling AT&T's brownfield network, Ford said, "The only way to achieve this is through more modular, interface-driven, API-driven infrastructure."

That's where the miniature cows come in. Plentiful, interchangeable, commoditized. Unlike a beloved cat you'd nurse back to health, "when they get sick, you get another one."

It's a technique that Google has mastered in its data centers. But rolling it out on an existing national network is a challenge of a different order.

Asked whether AT&T stands a chance to catch up with cloud early movers like Google, Ford told SDxCentral: "Well, we have the money. It's just a question of the vision."