Hyperscaler presents its 5G pitch to telcos, adding features along the way
After giving telcos a sneak peak of its platform at MWC Barcelona event, Microsoft has announced the general availability of its telco-targeted Azure Operator Nexus platform that is central to how the software and cloud giant wants to play in 5G.
Azure Operator Nexus cloud platform allows operators to run workloads or network functions on a pre-validated platform on-prem or in the Azure cloud. At MWC AT&T was the reference customer, running its 5G Standalone core on the platform, while Ericsson, Mavenir and Nokia are all offering core mobile applications via this platform.
To coincide with the launch, Microsoft announced a bevy of new features it hopes will win over more operators. The new network fabric automaton feature is a single point of control to build, operate and manage a carrier-grade network fabric from Azure.
There’s a network packet broker that can capture, aggregate, filter and monitor traffic to help with service planning and troubleshooting problems. Microsoft has also updated its Azure Kubernetes Service to improve cluster availability and let operators isolate and manage the performance of specific workloads.
Operator Nexus now also has native integration with the Azure Monitor service to help with logging, management and compliance. Microsoft’s AIOPs platform gets a new Azure Operator Service Manager, which among other things, retains observability data for Retention and Information Management compliance.
Finally, there is the Azure Lockbox, which allows operators control over access to data by Microsoft support engineers tasked with support issues.
AT&T thumbs up, vendors like it too
The platform poster-child AT&T has begun deploying Network Function workloads in its labs, with the intent to deploy them into production environments. Given Microsoft acquired AT&T’s network cloud technology business in mid-2021, the endorsement is not overly surprising.
“Operator Nexus GA is an important milestone in our journey with Microsoft and ecosystem collaborators on telco grade cloud for Mobility 5G Core,” said AT&T network CTO and SVP Igal Elbaz. “We are excited to see our vision of telco grade cloud powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies deployed in AT&T data centres and operated by AT&T. This will help deliver simplified operations, lower total cost of ownership, and improved time to market so we can continue to forge ahead with building the world’s best 5G service.”
Writing in a blog, Azure for Operators corporate VP Yousef Khalidi (pictured) said Nokia successfully executed an end-to-end 5G Standalone call, using its 5G core CNFs running on Operator Nexus. The company also established a reference design guide for its 5G core on Nexus. In another example, Ericsson, building on the success of working with AT&T, is now ready to begin trialling its cloud-native 5G Core with operators on Operator Nexus.
“Together with Microsoft, we established and achieved key milestones that give operators confidence to run our cloud-native 5G Core on Operator Nexus, enabling our customers to pursue vital network modernization goals and exciting monetization opportunities,” said Nokia Cloud and Network Services SVP core networks Fran Heeran.
“Our validation efforts with Microsoft have reached a watershed moment where operators are now able to test our 5G Core applications and orchestration suite on Operator Nexus and address their design goals for efficiency, security, and reliability,” said Ericsson VP and head of Solution Area Core Networks Monica Zethzon.
Next steps for platform
Khalidi said the plan is to include additional network function providers in the Operator Nexus Ready ecosystem plus add new containerised and virtualised network functions, supporting RAN, packet core, transport, and enterprise services.
“[Microsoft will also release] a smaller form factor deployment of Operator Nexus, optimised at both the hardware and software layers, to support the unique needs of the RAN for features such as in-line and look-aside network acceleration,” he said adding that Generative AI integration has going to happen too.