A Holistic View of Telco Clouds

We review two major categories of applications to be hosted in a Telco Cloud environment: end user services and telecom applications. A wide range of aspects like users, location, deployment, management, security and QoS requirements is discussed. End user services can be deployed by service providers or by mobile terminal users. Some services can run in central locations close to the operator's core network, while others - with strict latency requirements - will require the cloud infrastructure to be located close to the user. As user services could also 'easily' be deployed to existing IT clouds, we investigate and validate the benefits of telco clouds: access to operator data, higher trust level, better connectivity, QoS guarantees. In the other category we'll find telecom applications: they are provided by the operator itself for internal operations or to provide services for 3rd party applications. Most telecom applications are today distributed on hundreds of network elements and physical servers inside the operator infrastructure. Their deployment configuration and management is traditionally very complex and almost all of them have strict QoS requirements dictated by SLAs in terms of bandwidth, response time, latency etc. Moving telecom applications into the operator's private cloud (or more precisely transforming the operator infrastructure into a private IaaS cloud) promises significant gains in easier manageability, better scalability, lower OPEX. We argue for an optimized management layer on top of the private cloud automating the deployment and management, supporting advanced features for monitoring, fault management, elasticity and availability mechanisms. For optimal usage of the cloud infrastructure centralized resource control is needed that determines how virtual machines should be deployed based on available computing and network resources, QoS requirements/SLAs. We emphasize the importance of networking resources: to be able to provide E2E SLAs it is mandatory to have fine-grained control over the E2E network as well. This includes UE>Cloud, Cloud Edge>VM, VM>VM, Cloud>Cloud or Cloud>Enterprise connectivity reservations on demand, all of this through different internal and external domains. Our holistic approach of Cloud Management, Network as a Service and virtualized transport networks tries to enable this future architecture of telecom clouds and provides a framework for a fully virtualized operator infrastructure. Optimizing the virtualized IT and Telco resource usage together keeps the operating costs low while enables a range of new services. We will enumerate the requirements and elaborate the steps towards this future infrastructure.