VMware today organized and repackaged various technologies for mobile network operators as the 5G Telco Cloud Platform. This includes updated versions and more integrated support for VMware’s cloud-native software stack and network automation services. 

The vendor is also bringing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, a container-based distribution, to the platform to allow operators to build, manage, and run workloads across private or public clouds, telecommunications network infrastructure, and the edge. 

“For the last four or five years, we’ve worked with industries to help a number of operators virtualize their infrastructure so that they can have more flexibility compared to the siloed infrastructures that they were deploying before,” Lakshmi Mandyam, VP of product management for VMware’s telco and edge cloud, told SDxCentral in a phone interview. 

Some of those operators that have deployed virtualized infrastructure are now planning to bring cloud-native capabilities into the mix to deploy container-based network functions, she said. 

“As they look at 5G deployments, they see the complexity increasing significantly in terms of the kinds of network deployments where there’s going to be more edge nodes, there’s going to be more intelligence distributed at the edge,” and that requires automation and orchestration, Mandyam explained. 

“We have built a platform that allows them to deploy both virtualized infrastructure and container-as-a-service infrastructure together on a single platform with consistent infrastructure across their deployment,” she said. “And we’re enabling them to take advantage of automation capabilities to be able to automate the deployment and ongoing management of those infrastructures.”

This enables operators to more rapidly deploy services in an agile webscale environment, according to Mandyam, who pointed to the vendor’s recent 5G deal with Dish Network as an example of that effort. The agreement calls for Dish to use VMware’s platform as an abstraction layer running across multiple network domains and will allow Dish to tap into hyperscale public cloud capacity while maintaining core control points.

More than 120 service providers are using VMware to run their network infrastructure, according to Mandyam. The vendor also has network deals with AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and NTT DoCoMo. At least 35 partners have validated their network functions with VMware, and more than 180 functions have been validated to date, including the 5G core, virtual evolved packet core (EPC), virtual IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), mobile network services, SD-WAN, and others. 

VMware’s 5G Telco Cloud Platform also delivers unified support for virtual machines (VM) and Kubernetes-based containers with specific capabilities for carriers. Other updates include DevOps automation, a pipeline for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), lifecycle management, network automation, and container-based network functions. 

Telco Cloud Operations is another component of the umbrella platform that targets the operational piece, aiming to cut through the complexity of the network to allow service providers to maintain and assure service levels, Mandyam explained. The service is “designed to bridge the gap between virtual and physical worlds, so it provides holistic monitoring and network management across multiple layers of the network.”