Strategies for mobile edge computing and 5G among the three largest public cloud hyperscalers have crystallized during the last four months. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest of the trio, cemented an early lead when it released AWS Wavelength. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud followed with a series of moves during the last month in a bid to catch up and make their respective case for operators and enterprises that will use these services.

While these efforts have been under development and envisioned for years, the journey is just beginning. Operators, enterprises, developers, and engineers are all generally excited about the opportunities, but complexities and integration efforts that remain are abundant.

“As the 5G edge unfolds, we’ll start to see more of a marriage between the telcos and hyperscale clouds,” said Nick McQuire, SVP and head of enterprise research at CCS Insight. “There’s a lot of interest in the operator community around this area of the market without question, but there’s a lot of things, a lot of steps that they need to go through to get there.”

Reaching and educating developers is a widening example of that effort, but mobile operators haven’t done that well in the past, he said. Every operator is at a different level of comfort with the cloud and that usually correlates with the nature of their legacy businesses, he explained.

“Frankly, let’s be honest, there hasn’t been the trust, holistically and globally, across the telco community around the cloud. I think there’s historically been a question of these guys eating their lunch in the past in areas of their business,” McQuire told SDxCentral. 

Nonetheless, there’s widespread acknowledgement among operators that edge computing and core 5G network functions will be tightly interwoven with and fueled by public clouds. “They recognize that they need to scale like the cloud providers, that each can be managing to the cloud in order to achieve the economics that are favorable to them,” he said.

AWS Sets the Stage

Operators have been slowly cozying up with public cloud providers to advance their 5G goals and facilitate mobile edge computing, but until recently those deals have been mostly ad hoc or reached on a one-off basis. AWS effectively created an open field when it released Wavelength, a platform that can embed AWS compute and store at the edge of an operator’s mobile network. 

The hyperscaler announced deals with Verizon, Vodafone, SK Telecom, and KDDI at its annual developer conference in December, and says more global operators will be announced soon. 

“AWS does get some kudos because they have been working to create a telco vertical in the business for quite some time, and they obviously were first to launch Wavelength,” McQuire said. “Wavelength isn’t really at the moment about having a roll call of customers using the service. It’s about bringing developers into this arena for this low latency, converged 5G cloud area, and so that’s still going to take some time.”

Chris Barclay, principal product manager at AWS Wavelength, said the platform enables developers to serve use cases that require ultra-low latency like machine learning (ML) inference at the edge, autonomous industrial equipment, IoT, and various instances of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).

“5G is an emerging space,” Barclay said. “As with all new technologies, we expect many new use cases to be uncovered through the availability an enabling technology, such as AWS Wavelength combined with cost-effective cloud services that developers can spin up and scale back down, paying only for what they use.”

Limiting the multiple network hops that a mobile device must traverse before it can access resources is of critical importance, Barclay explained. “With Wavelength, AWS developers can deploy their applications to Wavelength Zones, AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within the network operators’ data centers at the edge of the 5G network so application traffic only needs to travel from the device to a cell tower to a Wavelength Zone running in a metro aggregation site.”

AWS is also adhering to a consistent developer experience, regardless of the network operator involved, by using familiar AWS services, APIs, and the tools already in use today. This approach, which positions Wavelength Zones in each customer’s Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, eliminates the “need for developers to negotiate for space and equipment with multiple telecommunications providers, and stitch together application deployment and operations through different management interfaces, before they can begin to deploy their applications,” he explained.

Google Careens Into 5G, Mobile Edge

Google Cloud is, in many respects, less advanced in its pursuit of new opportunities in 5G and mobile edge computing but the No. 3 cloud provider made an all-out push last month to bolster its platform for that objective. The company created an open cloud platform, Global Mobile Edge Cloud, to provide network operators with an environment to develop applications and a distributed edge.

Google is also bringing its expertise in Kubernetes, artificial intelligence (AI), ML, data, and analytics to bear for the effort. It named AT&T, Vodafone, Wind Tre, Altice USA, and T-Systems as early adopters in its push into the network operator landscape. 

Aparna Sinha, director of product management at Google Cloud, said the company’s approach to 5G is unique because it’s rooted in the company’s long-running experience with the Android ecosystem and the vast partnerships with operators and vendors.

The company describes its mobile edge computing strategy as a joint development effort with telecommunications companies, including AT&T, which is working with Google to create 5G edge computing services. “Essentially we want to partner with telecom companies to enable 5G as a business services platform,” Sinha said. 

“We’re helping telecoms monetize their investment in 5G. One of the ways we’re doing this is through providing an open platform, Anthos for Telecom, which will bring its Anthos cloud-native application platform for multicloud to the network edge, allowing telecommunications companies to run their applications wherever it makes the most sense,” she said. 

Anthos, which is based on Kubernetes, is now being expanded and positioned as a platform for network-centric applications. With respect to 5G and mobile edge computing, Google Cloud wants to help operators develop new revenues from 5G business services, data-driven experiences, and improve operations in core network infrastructure. 

However, it’s not yet clear how extensive Google Cloud’s approach will appeal to and win favor with operators compared to competing efforts that are further along from AWS and Microsoft Azure. 

“We haven’t seen enough from Google,” McQuire said. “They need to build out more partnerships with the operators and start to integrate their clouds more into the 5G network.”

Microsoft Rides Into 5G Edge Zones

Microsoft, like its competitors, has made strides in its push to position its public cloud for 5G and mobile edge computing. Within the span of a week, the No. 2 cloud provider acquired Affirmed Networks, a company that supports 5G deployments with a virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), and previewed Azure Edge Zones, which embeds compute, storage, and networking resources at the edge of carriers’ 5G networks.

There are two streams to Microsoft’s approach, according to McQuire. It’s trying to develop a unified set of hybrid and edge capabilities in Azure that network operators can integrate with or take to market in various guises, while also extending Azure as a cloud platform for mission-critical network operations and functions, he explained. 

Microsoft, which declined to be interviewed for this article, is pursuing a two-pronged strategy wherein it can “help telcos transform themselves in addition to helping them reach customers with edge solutions,” McQuire said. The combined effect of the Affirmed Networks acquisition and the Azure Edge Zones release is a major statement to that effect, he added.

Affirmed Networks last year launched its UnityCloud platform that supports 5G standalone deployments, and previously introduced its 5G non-standalone (NSA) mobile core platform running on AWS.

“Microsoft has had to kind of move in this direction regardless of the fact that AWS Wavelength is kind of the first move,” McQuire said. “There’s a lot of jockeying for position in this market, which is why I think it makes the Affirmed Networks acquisition for Microsoft really interesting.” It also marks a fairly new investment from the company in an effort to bring SDN and virtualization capabilities into the Azure cloud, he added.

On the edge computing front, Microsoft said it plans to deploy standalone Azure Edge Zones in various cities during the next 12 months and it is seeking deals with enterprises to deploy private edge zones. 

The company’s wide-ranging deal with AT&T is also gaining momentum with an Azure Edge Zone slated to be available in Los Angeles before this summer, according to Microsoft. A pool of operators, including AT&T, CenturyLink, Etisalat, NTT Communications, Proximus, Rogers, SK Telecom, Telefónica, Telstra, and Vodafone, have partnered with Microsoft and plan to make Azure Edge Zones available to customers later this year. 

Spinning Up a Multicloud, Multi-Carrier World

Each of the big three hyperscalers are taking somewhat unique approaches to 5G and the edge, and their respective services will underline those differences, according to McQuire. That also poses a perplexing question: “How do the operators embrace multicloud as the cloud providers are embracing multi-carriers?” he said. 

“It’s a real ecosystem play for all the players involved, and so I think the complexity is high and it’s going to take some time to simplify this stuff for the customer,” McQuire explained. 

Ultimately, decisions about which cloud or multiple clouds will be involved in each use case will come down the operators’ enterprise customers, he said. “If they are orienting around a specific cloud, then the operator will have no choice but to support the solution of a Google, or a Microsoft, or indeed an AWS. I think the customer will force the operators to work multicloud, but at the same time some of them will probably want to align and move their systems to a hyperscaler.”

It remains to be seen if operators can deliver a better experience for enterprises if their network functions, 5G network core, and mobile edge computing infrastructure are all riding on the same cloud. That end-to-end framework will carry weight in some arguments, but not all enterprises are going to be uniformly behind a single public cloud, McQuire said. 

“Most of the operators are going to have to become familiar with differentiating the various different edge products from the cloud providers,” he said. It’s a “fascinating transition” for mobile network operators and one that will materialize into a relatively standard approach five years from now, but a lot of work remains before “they get to that space, as opposed to being the bit pipes that they’ve been for so long.”