Telefónica still not fully sold on public cloud after AWS moveTelefónica still not fully sold on public cloud after AWS move

Since May, Telefónica has been umpiring a contest in Germany that pits Ericsson against a doubles partnership of AWS and Nokia. On the Swedish side of the net, Ericsson provides the 5G core for most of Telefónica Germany's customers, along with the unimaginatively named cloud-native infrastructure solution (CNIS), its own hosting platform. The challengers are supporting a smaller deployment of Nokia's 5G core on AWS infrastructure. It has been framed as a battle between the old timer of the private cloud, experienced but creaky, and the young and dynamic upstart of the public one, whose victory has been anticipated ever since AWS and Nokia showed up on court.

The widespread view was that Telefónica, by introducing AWS and Nokia into the mix, had signaled its plan to slowly phase out Ericsson and host its core network exclusively in the public cloud. Six months since the deal was announced, about 1 million of Telefónica's roughly 45 million customers have been shifted as planned, according to figures recently shared with Light Reading. Millions more would follow, many assumed. But Telefónica's senior technology leadership still regards the AWS and Nokia deployment as a test. And Ericsson still beats it at parts of the game.

Why even consider a move to the public cloud anyway? Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica's group director for core networks (among other things), says there are two main goals: to increase the level of automation and reduce the total cost of ownership. Once a network function is in the public cloud, a telco can make use of the telemetry and observability tools provided by AWS to measure performance, for instance. It could rely on the artificial intelligence (AI) expertise of AWS to boost efficiency.

Not much difference

Yet there currently appears to be little difference between CNIS and AWS when it comes to inference costs. Nor does the hyperscaler score points against Ericsson for automation. "Today, I can do more automation in CNIS than I can do in AWS," Carbajo told Light Reading at the FYUZ event in Dublin last month. "We are working for this to change, but we are working quite well with Ericsson today."

The revelation that Ericsson outperforms AWS on automation may surprise onlookers, but the Swedish vendor has the advantage of uniting its own cloud-native functions (CNFs) with its own infrastructure in what the industry commonly refers to as a "full stack" offer. "I can do more automation on top of Ericsson because Ericsson is working on top of its own infrastructure, and it is already developed," said Carbajo. Ericsson's orchestrator, critically, is designed to work optimally on Ericsson's infrastructure. If the public cloud is to catch up, the likes of Ericsson and Nokia will have to build functionality into their orchestrators to support it, according to the Telefónica executive.

Unfortunately, the number of available infrastructure platforms has mushroomed, and there is a complete lack of standardization at the infrastructure level. Carbajo describes this as one of the mistakes made during the 5G development process. The upshot is that vendors must deal with and certify a multitude of different platforms, including those built by individual telcos. Telefónica's contribution to the mix was Unica, a platform Carbajo conceived back in 2011, he says.

The problem is not limited to the actual containers-as-a-service (CaaS) platform, either. Operators use different software-defined network controllers, switching technologies and storage and compute systems. Servers must be fine-tuned to handle the demanding needs of the packet core, says Carbajo. But carrying out certification for various infrastructure alternatives drives up costs for telco vendors and their customers.

Sylva lining

Sylva, a project focused on CaaS standardization, is endorsed by Telefónica. But Carbajo clearly thinks more could and should be done. "If we standardized not only the CaaS – which is what Sylva is doing – but all the layers below, it would be great," he said. "And I think this should be a target for 6G."

Besides reducing costs, Sylva, it is hoped, will make it easier for Telefónica (along with other telcos) to move a core network application between infrastructure platforms. Yet none of the hyperscalers appears on Sylva's list of sponsors. If AWS wants a bigger share of Telefónica's business, it may have to become involved. "If you want me to put my network loads on top of you, you have to fulfill this standard," said Carbajo. "If not, I will not. This is something that we could show."

Carbajo has no desire to be wholly reliant on AWS. But while there has been no publicly communicated decision about the balance between private and public clouds in the Telefónica footprint, the AWS alternative under consideration appears to be another hyperscaler. "We are working as well with Google," said Carbajo. "Our dream would be to have two platforms, Google and AWS, and depending on who leads on traffic or cost or technical evolution, we can easily move traffic from one to the other."

Perhaps the key attraction of those hyperscaler platforms is their ability to take immediate advantage of the latest technologies. New chips Telefónica received this year offer an improvement in network efficiency of up to 40%, according to Carbajo. If one platform has adopted a technology such as Intel's Sapphire Rapids processor within three months of general availability, and an alternative must wait 18 months, Telefónica would naturally be drawn to the first.

But there are downsides to the public cloud, too. "A cloud provider can change the release of the software of the infrastructure without us knowing," said Carbajo. "If my CNF vendor has a conflict with this new software release, they have a problem, and I have to change many things in my operational process to ensure everything works fine." As his eyes rove from Ericsson to AWS and Nokia, it is still too soon to call game, set and match.