LOS ANGELES — While MEF has firmly taken the mantle as a standards defining body for SD-WAN, the association and its members are starting to follow the same playbook applied in its early years to carrier Ethernet, to other pursuits like security in SD-WAN and edge computing.

Edge computing is an increasing area of interest to network operators and many are taking steps to implement the technology in tandem with 5G deployments, but these efforts differ somewhat in strategy and application. Multiple operators and vendors shared their views on edge computing at MEF 2019 this week as the association made strides toward defining the technology and what it can enable for operators.

Edge computing is a dispersion or distribution of the cloud and latency is the driving force of this evolution, explained MEF CTO Pascal Menezes. “Latency is the new game in digital services,” he said during his keynote.

MEF members have a “huge asset” in the form of real estate that can be used for edge computing, and as those organizations deploy compute functions at the edge it’s critical that work is done to connect myriad network functions, he said.

If done right, every service provider can deliver thousands of regional edge points to the cloud, Menezes said. But those connections have to be done in an automated way, and that’s where MEF’s work on Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Sonata APIs come into play, he added.

MEF has launched a certification program and software development kit (SDK) to standardize multiple sets of LSO APIs that enable service automation across providers, Menezes explained in an interview with SDxCentral earlier this year. The initial focus is on automating ordering of carrier Ethernet, but the goal is to eventually extend this automation to other MEF 3.0 services including SD-WAN, security, optical transport, and IP.

“It’s not just about your edge cloud, or your prem, or your telco cloud, or the public cloud, it’s all of it — all of it coming together as a sort of managed single entity in terms of the services that operate over those clouds,” said Susan White, head of SDN and NFV strategy at Netcracker. She added that orchestration of edge cloud service is likely to reach commercialization in 2020.

Mark Halbfinger, CEO of PCCW Global, a Hong Kong-based operator, said it’s imperative that networks, fabrics, network operators, and cloud providers come together to transform the information and communications technology industry. “We need to get the cloud community involved and really focus on the common modeling and the commercial settlement associated with the technical architectural structure of that common model,” he said.

A technical interface without a thoughtful process to automate the back end is going to lead to challenges, Halbfinger explained. “Massive fiber and 5G deployments will be driving IoT, and I think here is the use case to drive edge computing. Edge compute is a test for both the cloud platforms and the network service providers on how to interact and to monetize each other’s capital base,” he said at the event.

While cloud providers’ capital has been largely directed to workforce talent to fuel research and software capabilities, network operator capital has been largely spent on investments in fiber and 5G infrastructure of late, Halbfinger said. “These two capital investments have to come to come together for that large base of industrial enterprise users.”

Bob Victor, SVP of product management at Comcast, reiterated that call for a more centralized approach. The industry is suffering from a shortage of skilled labor, particularly as it relates to the edge or endpoints of the network, he said.

A duo of executives at AT&T Business also shared a high level view of the operator’s edge computing strategy. “Edge allows businesses to route application-specific traffic to where it is needed and where it can be most effective, whether that's in the cloud, at the ends of the network or on premise, which is incredibly important because it gives businesses more control over their traffic,” said Suzanne Galvanek, VP of enterprise networking at AT&T Business.

She described AT&T’s vision in the context of combining its core network, network overlay, virtualized edge, and distributed cloud with services that can address every site type that enterprises require. AT&T claims to be the largest domestic provider of fiber-based services for businesses with 500,000 business buildings connected to fiber services today. That real estate and fiber plays heavily into the operator’s edge computing strategy, Galvanek explained.

“Creating that balance between costs and performance at each individual site type is not a one size fits all; even with the advent of SD-WAN it’s not a one size fits all,” she said. “What’s critically important is that we’re delivering flexible and extensible platforms that seamlessly bridge from one edge of the network to the other edge of the network — from LAN to WAN to the applications in the cloud.”

Josh Goodell, VP of edge solutions at AT&T Business, remarked on the ongoing debate about where the edge exists. The operator views the edge in the middle of a spectrum that is anchored by devices or applications at one end and centralized public or private cloud environments at the other, he said.

The edge resides in a continuum between devices, the customer edge, network edge (areas outside the four walls of a facility), and in centralized cloud environments, Goodell concluded.