by Hitendra “Sonny” Soni, senior vice president worldwide sales and marketing, Kaloom
Elvis Presley sang the song “If I can dream” in ‘68, inspired by the turmoil a growing nation was going through. In today’s pandemic reality, connectivity has become more important than ever, but innovation needs to take place at multiple levels to get us where we need to be.
When our startup was founded, the assumptions that SDN and NFV would deliver programmability, automation, drive down costs and disrupt vendor lock-in had not yet materialized despite years of effort from the networking community.
While SDN promised the Net Ops engineer’s dream of a truly programmable network, it initially enabled just a limited amount of additional software control and flexibility. Without programmability, the hardware could only perform the functions it was created with and networking would continue to lag behind the rapid advances made in other cloud technologies such as storage, compute and application development.
Gartner comments about SDN’s “Plateau of Productivity” on the analyst firm’s famous hype-cycle curve has led to multiple pundit headlines such as “SDN is dead, long live SDN” and my personal favorite “SDN has left the building.” However, these are not just about naming nuances. They represent the true pitfalls of SDN as it was originally intended – specifically taking so long to mature, being difficult to operationalize and not delivering on lowering networking’s costs.
Whatever you were doing, or wanted to do, in software you couldn’t change what the non-programmable chip/hardware was capable of. This meant that the much-anticipated rapid innovation pace of software development and open source collaboration that were supposed to accelerate networking capabilities were still hamstrung by a years-long hardware product cycle. If I could dream of a truly cloud-native programmable fabric, here are five characteristics that cloud-native edge solutions would look like.
1. Open Source
The real vision of SDN and NFV is built on community-based, open-source standards such as those from the IETF, ONF, The Broadband Forum, The Linux Foundation, and many others.
Recent years have seen an entire ecosystem of truly open-source, collaborative communities geared towards solving the challenges created by SDN’s initial vision. In fact, there are so many “.orgs” working on this that it can be confusing for service providers to decide which one to use to address each of its various needs. Today, many of these have joined, merged, or collaborated with the IEEE, Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Apache, Linux and – in the case of Kubernetes – its Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), among others.
2. Live Truly on the Edge
New 5G-enabled apps require extreme low latency which demands a distributed edge architecture that puts applications close to their data source and end users. We can’t have autonomous vehicles or other mission-critical manufacturing apps experiencing loss of signal, network interruptions or increased latency. The delicacy of their connection to the network must be automatically prioritized. Workloads need to be managed and decisions made at edge-level precision which requires an end-to-end latency below 10 milliseconds. Much of our public cloud infrastructure today is not yet set up for this.
For example, the latency from New-York to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure in Northern - Virginia is greater than 20 milliseconds. Simply not good enough. The image below, which is taken from The Linux Foundation’s State of the Edge (SOTE) 2020 report, demonstrates the importance of low latency in supporting next-gen applications.
3. Make Real-Business ‘Cents
At the moment, the 5G business case is simply not justified, and carriers will not deploy true nationwide 5G because there is no demand for it yet and there needs to be an opportunity to monetize. For example, service providers’ revenues from smartphone users running 3G/4G were about $50 per month. However, connected cars will only generate about $1 or $2 per month, and installing 5G requires extreme amounts of upfront investments, not only in antennas but also in the backend servers, storage, and networking switches required to support these apps. The reality is that 5G will requires a 10x reduced total cost of ownership for the infrastructure deployments to be profitable.
To succeed any new technology must deliver significant economic disruption. One example of this is network slicing, or partitioning network architectures into virtual data centers while using the same shared physical infrastructure. With 5G-enabled secure, end to end, fully isolated network slicing, it’s conceivable that different service providers – for example MVNOs – could share the same physical network resources while maintaining different SLAs and offering differentiated services. They could also share a half- or full rack, depending on how many servers their apps require. This could enable initial 5G service rollouts while minimizing costs, and risks, via shared infrastructure.
4. Be Green
If there is anything this pandemic has taught us, it is that efficiency is king. We all stopped and realized just how much we needed to get by and how much was wasted. As the global manufacturing economy came to an abrupt halt in early 2020, we turned our focus on critical infrastructure. In that light, many local central offices (COs) are nearly maxed-out in terms of available space, power and cooling, leaving little room to support additional rack units (RUs).
In fact, large regional cloud facilities were not built for the new distributed edge paradigm and service providers’ legacy Central Office (CO) architectures are even more ill-suited for the shift. Containing an odd mishmash of old and new equipment from each decade going back at least 50 years, these facilities are also typically near the limit of their space, power and cooling requirements.
This major buildup to 5G-supported edge infrastructure will have an extremely negative impact on the environment in terms of energy consumption. According to the Linux Foundation’s State of the Edge 2020 report, by 2028 it will consume 102,000 megawatts of power and over $700 billion in cumulative CAPEX will be spent within the next decade on edge IT infrastructure and data center facilities. We need technology that can dramatically and rapidly reduce the power required to provide these new 5G services and apps to consumers and enterprises. This image, also from the SOTE2020 report, shows the massive need for more power to support 5G and its next-gen apps.
5. Built on Collaboration
The “edge” is complicated and in many cases cloud players and telcos have yet to fully comprehend how to manage distributed edge locations and the next-generation of applications they will run. In order to truly succeed this dream takes a village to build, where carriers, network operators and cloud-native solution providers work together. Because if we dream it, we can build it. We truly believe in our calling and we may yet get to that promised land. Ok, that is the last Elvis pundit for this post. Thank you very much.
Hitendra “Sonny” Soni is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Kaloom. With over 25 years of experience in sales, business development and marketing in the data center and cloud networking, converged infrastructures and management solutions, Sonny is a passionate entrepreneur, who has spent his entire career bringing innovative technology to the market.
