5G new infrastructure, a new strategic "high ground" for cloud giants to accelerate their layout

Connecting more and more data, applications and connections to the cloud is already an important step in the digital transformation of enterprises. However, making edge applications run more efficiently and collecting data to the cloud or local data centers for processing and analysis are obviously out of step with the urgent pace of digital transformation of enterprises.

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With this in mind, cloud providers also hope to bring diversified cloud services, elasticity, and on-demand expansion to the edge. Many leading companies use technologies such as hyper-convergence (HCI) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) to build micro data centers nearby to meet application operation and data storage and processing. As enterprises increase their adoption of cloud, they hope to use rich cloud services at the edge and hand over infrastructure maintenance to cloud providers to accelerate application innovation and data application.

5G and edge computing mature, and the cloud is getting closer to the edge

The intersection of edge computing and cloud computing is inseparable from the fit of two aspects. First, the surge in edge devices and the data generated has forced enterprises to transmit data to remote data centers, which has invisibly increased challenges in terms of network bandwidth, performance, and data security. If data is processed nearby, it can not only improve the efficiency of obtaining data value, but also effectively improve the efficiency of infrastructure and reduce costs.

According to Gartner's forecast, there will be more than 26 billion IoT devices worldwide by 2020, which will undoubtedly attract companies' attention to massive data. Effective use of data will bring companies deeper business insights and decision-making basis.

The commercialization of 5G has further encouraged enterprises to increase investment in the edge to build new business models. According to the latest data released by my country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of March 2020, China has built 198,000 5G base stations and the number of package users has exceeded 50 million.

According to the "New Infrastructure Development White Paper" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CADI) think tank of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the 5G industry chain covers a wide range, and 5G base station infrastructure will drive the rapid growth of the market size of various types of terminals and industry applications such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and high-definition video. It is expected that by 2025, the cumulative investment in the entire 5G industry chain will exceed 5 trillion yuan.

Secondly, the impact of edge applications and data on edge computing and data centers depends on the intersection of multiple technology adoptions, such as 5G, edge architecture, edge AI, and edge data structures, and these technologies are accelerating toward maturity. According to Gartner's edge computing maturity curve, edge computing technologies such as 5G, edge AI, IoT edge architecture, and micro-cloud will mature in the next 2-5 years, paving the way for enterprises to bring cloud to the edge.

According to Wikipedia's definition of edge computing - Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that brings computing and data storage closer to where it is needed, thereby improving response time and saving bandwidth. Edge computing greatly expands this approach. Virtualization technology makes it easier to deploy and run various applications on edge servers.

It has become a consensus among cloud computing giants to move the cloud closer to the edge in order to occupy a favorable market position at the edge. Currently, mainstream providers in the cloud computing market are expanding their cloud services and solutions at the 5G edge.

Cloud giants accelerate their layout in the strategic "high ground" of new infrastructure

Cloud giants are accelerating their layout to seize the strategic "high ground" of new infrastructure. Bringing many cloud capabilities to the 5G edge to help telecom operators expand their business models, such as smart cities, autonomous driving, industrial Internet, Internet of Things, and application scenarios such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

Because of the increase in 5G transmission speed, terminals can run more complex applications, which will generate more data and bring about a surge in application traffic. If application traffic and data can be processed nearby, the realization of the above application scenarios will be greatly accelerated.

In the past, terminal devices transmitted traffic to base stations, then to their metropolitan area sites for aggregation, and then transmitted to enterprise data centers or clouds for processing via the Internet or dedicated lines. Now, cloud providers put their infrastructure or cloud service functions in metropolitan area sites, process application traffic and data nearby, and return them to terminals to promote the implementation of application scenarios.

AWS was the first to bring its cloud service capabilities to the 5G edge. At the end of 2019, AWS released AWS Wavelength, an AWS infrastructure deployment that embeds AWS computing and storage services into the edge of 5G networks and operators' data centers. This eliminates the latency caused by multiple hops between regional aggregation sites and the Internet, and also helps enterprises save on equipment energy, bandwidth and other resource consumption.

At the same time, Wavelength integrates AWS APIs, tools, and functions that users are already accustomed to using, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and cloud service functions such as AWS ECS and Amazon EKS container orchestration.

Google, Microsoft and IBM have also launched cloud services this year to meet the needs of 5G edge deployment, which are similar to AWS Wavelength.

Google has brought Anthos for Telecom, bringing the Anthos cloud platform to the 5G edge. Anthos itself is a platform that meets the needs of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud applications, integrating functions such as Google's Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Containerization is the core advantage of Anthos for Telecom, and more and more new development projects are based on containerization.

Microsoft's edge computing platform Azure Edge Zones, in which the operator's Azure edge zone is specifically for telecom operators. It is a small extension of Azure, placed in the telecom operator's data center to provide Microsoft Azure's service functions.

IBM also recently released IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager, which integrates IBM Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat's OpenShift platform to provide intelligent automation capabilities to orchestrate virtual and container network functions.

As mentioned above, AWS and Microsoft have chosen to build edge infrastructure with telecom operators to provide end users with integrated cloud services such as computing and storage, containers, APIs and tools. Google and IBM emphasize embedding their core capabilities, such as GKE and OpenShift, into operators' data centers to enhance end users' ability to develop and manage networks.

Currently, cloud giants are also stepping up their cooperation with global telecom operators to enable users to build innovative applications with lower latency on 5G networks, ushering in a new wave of 5G commercialization.