Mini Guide

TELCO CLOUD
Part 1 of 6: A Birds Eye View of Telco Cloud

A publication of
Black belt in training & consulting

Do You Secretly Wonder

What Telco Cloud
Really Is?
Do you feel you know what Telco Cloud is? Perhaps you just sort of know it?
Maybe you feel you know what it is but have problems explaining it to others.
Or could it be that you actually dont know but feel embarrassed to ask? No
worries. Youre not the only one. And there is help available.
There is a lot of buzz about the Telco Cloud. And there are fantastic business
opportunities that both operators and vendors are starting to pursue.
But we notice that many are confused. There is very little information available
for either managers or experts that explain Telco Cloud in an easy manner.
So we decided to put together this guide for anyone who works within the
world of modern telecommunications and plan to stay there for more than a
few years. Because the revolution is coming, whether youre prepared or not,
and everyone will need at least a grasp of what Telco Cloud really is. You will
need to understand what Cloud professionals mean when they talk in order to
not be left behind in this rapid development.
The good news is that its not that difficult at all.

This free guide provides an overview of the five parts that make up
Telco Cloud. And in the following five mini guides well explain each
part more in detail.

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A Birds Eye View of Telco Cloud

Telco Cloud is coming, whether youre ready or not. And it can be
confusing. But a lot of the technology is not new, its just packaged
in a new way, and in a new place. You can even argue that if you
break Telco Cloud down into its constituent parts, its actually quite
simple!
I know that it seems difficult to understand what Cloud really is. I do, because
Ive made that journey myself! A couple of years ago we at IP-Solutions were
frustrated because there seemed to be so many contradicting ideas of what
Cloud technology is. But I believe that it was never really that difficult at all. It
was just always badly explained, and the bad explanations got passed on
making it an industry-wide Chinese-whispers game, trailing farther and farther
from the original truth.
Take a look at the picture. It has five important aspects of modern Telco Cloud
in red text and each of the aspects can be easily explained, one by one. Look
at the bottom grey box. Its a data center running a number of apps.

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What are those apps? Along the bottom of the picture you see examples, but
the list is not exhaustive. Its essentially every machine, server, router,
appliance whatever you want to call them that build up an operators
network. Anything that is usually drawn as a box with an acronym in it, and
lines going out of it, is most likely what we call an app. This is because they
are all really computer programs running in computers, connected to a
computer network. All of them.
If we build those apps so that they can run on any standard hardware that you
get at your favourite computer store, they can share the hardware. Imagine the
gain in only having to maintain one kind of hardware instead of specialized
hardware for every single node! Shared Hardware (1) is important in Telco
Cloud, and an important technology to achieve this is virtualization (learn more
about virtualization in the mini guide on Shared Hardware).
If I need to start one more app, what then? Maybe I have four PE routers
running, and realize that I need a fifth because the customer load is increasing?
As long as I have a little bit of that standard hardware to spare in my data
center, I can use it to start any app. They all run on the same hardware,
remember? Scaling the number of running apps up or down is called Rapid
Elasticity (2), because its almost like stretching a rubber band in and out.
So far everything has taken place in the same geographical location, the same
data center. But most operators have a number of data centers or PoPs (pointsof-presence). Perhaps that fifth PE router shouldnt be started in Stockholm but
in Paris? Or maybe the need was first seen in Stockholm but then the customer
behaviour changed so that the PE router would need to move! If the data
centers are joined in such a way that we get something near Complete
Network Connectivity (3), its easy to start apps wherever we want, or even
move them between geographical locations.
What would it actually mean to move that PE router from Stockholm to Paris?
The app has to be stopped in Stockholm, another instance has to be started up
in Paris, users may need to be handed over, data may need to be migrated
between the locations and new secure connections may need setting up. This is
not something the data centers themselves know how to do. In fact the
Stockholm data center doesnt really know any other data centers exist. It
does its job, runs its apps, processes data coming in, and sends it out. The move

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of an app has to be controlled from the outside with some sort of Central
Service Control (4). This is the place where the commands go out to stop and
start the apps, for instance.
But even this level of control is more detailed than we want our poor humans,
the operator employees, to have to deal with. Even if what really needs to be
done is all that stopping and starting, and migrating data, and setting up
security, it could also be described just by dragging the PE router from the
Stockholm part of an image to the Paris part. A simple drag-and-drop operation
in a graphical user interface suits us humans perfectly, while no humans work
in the actual Cloud control. No human interaction (5) between the
management system and the Cloud control is important to simplify and
automate complex operations.

All in all it becomes a super-flexible way for the operator people

(lower left) to offer services to the paying customers people
(upper right) with a network that:

is easy to maintain
contains fewer different platforms
makes it easy to move services around
enables easy scaling of a services capacity up or down

All of this is achieved by:

1. Sharing standard hardware among customers and services
2. Making it easy to rapidly, elastically, start or stop applications
providing these services
3. Connecting the network elements in a generic, service nonspecific, way
4. Controlling all of these applications and network elements
from a central location
5. Making this network control largely automatic

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In the following five mini guides, well put a little more meat on the
bones for each of these five aspects of Telco Cloud. They may also seem
vague, or almost magic sometimes, but if we break them down like we
did in this overview youll learn that they are not that complicated
either.

See you there!

Abbreviations Guide
App
COTS
ETSI
GUI
HSS
MANO
MPLS
NFV
NFVI
OS
PDN
PE Router
PGW
PoP
SBC
SDN
SSD
Telco
VLAN
VM
VNF

IP-Solutions

Application
Commercial off-the-shelf
European Telecommunications Standards Institute
Graphical User Interface
Home Subscriber Server
Management and Orchestration
Multi-Protocol Label Switching
Network Function Virtualization
NFV Infrastructure
Operating System
Packet Data Network
Provider Edge Router
PDN Gateway
Point-of-Presence
Session Border Controller
Software-Defined Networking
Solid-State Drive
Telecommunications
Virtual LAN
Virtual Machine
Virtual Network Function

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