cloud whitepaper - telco sp cloud market - challenges

© Copyright Canonical 2013 www.canonical.com

WHITE PAPER

Entering the cloud frayBuilding successful cloud strategies for telcos and service providers in an evolving market.

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Executive introduction In a shifting market, the traditional revenues of telcos and service providers are under threat. Voice revenues are at an all-time low, and high wireless data costs are negatively impacting margins. As an additional challenge, many enterprises are moving low-value workloads and applications to public clouds such as Amazon, eroding traditional managed hosting revenues.

To overcome these challenges and remain profitable, telcos and service providers are building cloud computing into their service delivery strategies. This is enabling them to launch new cloud-based IT services that drive additional broadband traffic over their networks, helping them increase core revenues and access new commercial opportunities.

The cloud makes it possible, for example, for telcos and service providers to deliver new compute and storage services, launch new machine-to-machine (M2M) services such as automated asset management and meter reading for utilities companies, and deliver converged communications and IT services backed up by enterprise-grade SLAs. Many telcos and service providers are also brokering third-party cloud services to their customers, providing hot-swapping between cloud providers based on business rules for cost and performance.

Telcos and service providers are ideally positioned to capitalise on the many commercial opportunities the cloud offers. They own or control the networks needed to connect customers with cloud services, and have the skills and experience to deliver end-to-end data security and governance. Critically, while public cloud providers offer lower compute and storage prices for start-ups, most enterprises still require the more robust services and SLAs of a telco or service provider.

The wide-ranging opportunities of cloud-based delivery mean the question for telcos and service providers is no longer whether to adopt cloud-based delivery strategies, but how? Successful cloud deployment depends on a number of factors, from an operator’s choice of cloud technology, to engaging the right deployment support and technical support from cloud experts.

In this paper, we discuss how telcos and service providers can build a successful cloud strategy, and how open-source technology can help. Specifically, we discuss which open-source technology is best for building telco and service provider clouds, and introduce the next generation of open-source cloud, which pre-integrates all the infrastructure, systems, tools and services telcos and service providers need.

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Contents BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL CLOUD STRATEGY 3

CHOOSING THE RIGHT CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 4

ACHIEVING OPEN-SOURCE CLOUD SUCCESS 7

CONCLUSION 8

ABOUT CANONICAL AND UBUNTU FOR TELCOS AND SERVICE PROVIDERS 9


Building a successful cloud strategy To maximise margins for cloud-based services, and provide the greatest possible value for stakeholders and subscribers, telcos and service providers need to minimise the cost of their cloud-computing infrastructure. As well as building the cloud on commodity hardware and low-cost software, every element of service delivery must be automated to reduce management costs, from resource provisioning and service orchestration, to usage monitoring and billing.

Service providers’ cloud infrastructure must also be ‘carrier-grade’ by definition, and capable of delivering the high levels of performance, availability and security today’s enterprise customers demand. It should also be highly resilient, properly supported and totally secure, with logical separation of customer systems and data in the multi-tenant environment.

To support the IT and communications requirements of enterprise customers, cloud infrastructure must be extremely flexible and able to handle any kind of application or workload. Customers must be able to scale resources up and down on demand to meet the fluctuating requirements of their own end users and customers, paying only for the resources they use.


Choosing the right cloud infrastructure THE PITFALLS OF PROPRIETARY CLOUDS

While many proprietary software vendors offer packaged cloud solutions that are fast and simple to deploy, many of these are prohibitively expensive for telcos and service providers in terms of both licensing and support. This means they are unable to provide the margins needed to make cloud-based services profitable.

There are also a number of other risks for carriers that choose to deploy proprietary cloud technologies, including:

• Vendor lock-in Telcos and service providers that choose to deploy proprietary cloud infrastructure may be tied into costly forced software upgrades. In addition, proprietary technologies invariably limit the flexibility of any cloud strategy, making it difficult or impossible to migrate workloads to other private or public cloud platforms in the future, even if it makes good economic or business sense to do so.

• Inability to scale due to high software costs One of the major issues with proprietary clouds is that additional licenses are required to add new physical and virtual servers to the environment. This increases the risk that the cloud will not be able to scale cost effectively to meet the needs of hundreds, or even thousands of enterprise customers in the future.

• Costly, inflexible support contracts In a mission-critical enterprise environment, effective cloud support is a key success factor. However, support agreements with proprietary cloud vendors are typically highly inflexible and expensive, requiring all machines across the environment to be supported under the vendor’s terms. This may increase costs and impact margins on cloud services.

• Limited cloud features Proprietary cloud software evolves quite slowly, with only a small number of developers working on new code. This means that new functionality is typically only delivered with new releases of software, and that customers may be kept waiting for the features they request and need.

• High hardware costs Some proprietary cloud technologies are only certified for a small number of hardware platforms. This means that telcos and service providers have limited procurement options, and that low-cost commodity hardware may not be available to support their choice of cloud software – which often means higher overall hardware costs.


THE BENEFITS OF OPEN-SOURCE CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES

Service providers can mitigate these risks by choosing to deploy open-source cloud infrastructure. This provides a number of key benefits, from lower infrastructure costs and comprehensive cloud feature sets, to regular updates delivered through a coordinated, worldwide development effort.

Open-source technologies are also able to give service providers the scalability they need, enabling them to add servers to their environments at will with no additional licensing costs. With no licenses to buy, and no proprietary software to update and maintain, operators can maximise margins on cloud services and ensure that their cloud business is profitable from day one.

Open by nature as well as name, the best open-source cloud infrastructure uses de facto industry standard APIs, giving service providers the flexibility to port workloads between different private and public cloud platforms at will. By building flexibility into their cloud strategy in this way, open-source technologies help service providers adapt their clouds seamlessly to meet changing business needs.

Yet another benefit of open-source cloud technology is certification for a wide array of hardware. The best open-source offerings can be deployed on all brands of servers, and support different technology architectures, including X86 and ARM.


OPEN-SOURCE CLOUD-BUILDING CHALLENGES

While open-source cloud infrastructure has clear flexibility and cost advantages over proprietary alternatives, deployment of open-source clouds can be complex and time consuming. Specialist technical knowledge and skills are needed, for example, to deploy, integrate and manage different open-source cloud components and interfaces. What’s more, this complexity can make migration of open-source clouds from the lab into full production a daunting proposition.

Several of the challenges associated with open-source cloud building include:

• Integration requirements with multiple, disparate components needed to build a comprehensive, production-ready cloud solution

• Extensive testing to ensure seamless scaling from ‘test’ clouds to live operations

• Lack of a comprehensive toolset to automate cloud deployment processes, from bare metal provisioning, to service orchestration – which increases complexity, manual administration and overall costs

• Manual development and deployment of security policies to ensure customer systems and data are protected in the multi-tenancy environment

• Lack of enterprise-class support with users left to rely on community help and documentation, which is not an appropriate level of support for mission-critical enterprise applications

The manual work typically required to build and deploy open-source clouds can jeopardise managed hosting providers’ cloud strategies and increase time to market. There is also a risk that cloud services will not translate well from the lab into production, and that they will ultimately fail to meet customers’ expectations in terms of quality or availability.


Achieving open-source cloud success To overcome the challenges associated with deploying open-source clouds, telcos and service providers need the right mix of infrastructure, tools and enterprise-class support. What’s needed is a ‘production-ready’, open-source cloud environment that is engineered specifically to meet the needs of operators.

This should pre-integrate:

• Enterprise-class cloud infrastructure Telcos and service providers need cloud infrastructure components that can meet enterprise-class requirements for availability, performance and uptime. One example of such infrastructure is the leading open-source cloud infrastructure platform OpenStack, which provides all the compute, storage and network components needed to build a production cloud, with end-to-end service automation, seamless scalability and high availability configurations.

• A stable, full-featured operating environment To ensure success, telcos and service providers need to build their clouds on a stable, secure, open-source operating system that is synchronised with the underlying cloud infrastructure both in terms of development and release cycles to ensure all the latest cloud features are supported. It helps to choose an operating system with a strong cloud heritage, and ideally one that is supported for a minimum of five years.

• Innovative cloud deployment and configuration tools These should speed up the process of configuring bare metal servers, deploying and orchestrating OpenStack cloud components, and deploying and orchestrating individual workloads and applications in the cloud.

• Cloud monitoring and management tools To maximise margins on cloud services, monitoring and management processes must be highly automated. Telcos and service providers need tools for managing their cloud infrastructure centrally through a single, centralised console.

• Deployment and technical support services Telcos and service providers need end-to-end deployment support and ongoing technical support for their open-source cloud projects. Operators should choose support partners with extensive experience of delivering large cloud implementations, migrations to open-source cloud technologies, and technical cloud support.


Conclusion Service providers around the world are investing in cloud strategies and infrastructure to increase revenue-generating traffic on their networks and bring new cloud-based services to market. When it comes to deploying cloud infrastructure to support these services, many operators are attracted to open-source cloud technologies, which offer very low cost of ownership, seamless scalability and full service automation.

Despite the benefits of open-source cloud technologies, however, there is still a perception that open-source clouds are complex and time consuming to deploy and manage, requiring specific skills sets which may not be available.

To help telcos and service providers overcome this obstacle, and deploy open-source cloud infrastructure quickly with minimal risk, a new generation of open-source cloud is needed. This should pre-integrate all the infrastructure, software, tools and services required to build a successful cloud strategy from day one.

For more information on the issues discussed in this paper, or to find out more about the next generation of open-source cloud for telcos and service providers, please visit ubuntu.com/cloud


About Canonical and Ubuntu for Telcos and Service Providers Leading telcos and service providers depend on Canonical to assist, guide and support them in making the most of their production cloud offerings. Based on our experience of helping seven of the top 10 operators deploy production clouds, we have created tightly integrated cloud technologies that minimise deployment risk and speed time to market.

Ubuntu pre-integrates all the infrastructure, software, tools and services that telcos and service providers need to achieve cloud success. With a tried-and-tested reference architecture and deployment methodology, we can help operators deploy clouds faster, and ensure that cloud services meet customers’ requirements for performance and availability.

As an integrated element of the Canonical/Ubuntu proposition, Canonical supports every stage of cloud deployment, from design and implementation, to ongoing technical support. We provide telcos and service providers with an efficient, production ready and cost effective route to the open-source cloud.

cloud whitepaper - telco sp cloud market - challenges

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