Designed for Cloud RAN workloads provide cloud native infrastructure and services to deploy, operate, and scale virtualized RANs, AWS Outposts racks modernize on-premises 5G network workloads requiring low latency and high throughput
At Mobile World Congress, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) today announced AWS Outposts racks for high throughput, network-intensive workloads and AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) workloads — new offerings that enable telecom service providers (telcos) to extend AWS infrastructure and services to deploy on-premises network functions requiring low latency, high throughput, and real-time performance. Both offerings will be generally available later this year to support hosting 5G Core user plane function (UPF), RAN centralized unit (CU), and RAN distributed unit (DU) workloads.
AWS Outposts racks for high throughput, network-intensive workloads and AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud RAN workloads help telcos modernize legacy networks and accelerate the deployment of virtualized cloud-based networks. The offerings extend the seamless and secure cloud infrastructure and services from AWS Regions and large metro areas to customers’ on-premises data centers and edge locations. This continuum of AWS infrastructure and services—include AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Outposts—addresses telcos’ needs for low-latency, migration and modernization, data residency, and local data processing use cases.
“The breakthrough innovations will enable superior end-customer experiences, faster network deployment, better price performance, and reduced cost of ownership.”
– Dave Brown, Vice President of Compute and Networking, Amazon Web Services
“With the new AWS Outposts offerings, the AWS Cloud Continuum can now extend to the furthest edge of the 5G network, allowing Telcos to run their entire 5G network including 5G Core and 5G RAN on AWS cloud services. The AWS Outposts rack offering features a new architecture that allows cost efficient capacity scaling to meet the growing throughput demands on the most densely populated 5G networks globally. The AWS Outposts server offering supports both Open and Virtual RAN architectures with complete feature and performance parity with appliance-based 5G RAN. These offerings will empower Telcos to build a future-proof cloud infrastructure to support 5G and beyond. The breakthrough innovations will enable superior end-customer experiences, faster network deployment, better price performance, and reduced cost of ownership,” said Dave Brown, Vice President of Compute and Networking, Amazon Web Services
Targeting high throughput, network-intensive workloads
The new AWS Outposts racks are built for high throughput and network-intensive on-premises workloads and provide cost-efficient traffic scaling to meet the ever-growing throughput demands on 5G Core UPF and RAN CU workloads. This gives mobile operators the flexibility to place workloads at different locations based on latency, throughput, and traffic aggregation requirements, enabling advanced 5G use cases of the future. Operators can now use the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, tools, and a common continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline wherever their workloads reside. This consistent cloud experience eases operational burden, reduces integration costs, and maximizes new feature development velocity for operators.
“The new AWS Outposts racks enable porting and deploying Nokia’s 5G Core workloads on AWS services in customers’ data centers.”
– Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia
The AWS Outposts racks feature new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable-based (Sapphire Rapids) bare metal instances along with a high-performance bare metal network fabric, providing key benefits for telcos including:
- Support for high throughput, network-intensive on-premises workloads: The AWS Outposts racks allow telcos to run high-throughput workloads with EC2 bare metal instances and a bare metal network fabric that can flexibly scale to meet increasing performance requirements.
- Enhanced security and performance with AWS Nitro System: The new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances on the AWS Outposts racks are built on the same AWS Nitro System that powers modern Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Regions, extending the enhanced security and performance benefits of the Nitro System to distributed telco network locations.
- Automated deployment, management, and scaling: The AWS Outposts racks support pre-validated Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) add-ons required to automate the deployment, management, and scaling of microservices-based 5G network functions.
- Improved operational efficiency with regional AWS services: With AWS Outposts, telcos can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the parent AWS Region. They can monitor their entire 5G network with a single set of AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and Amazon Managed Grafana. In addition, telcos can simplify 5G network operations with advanced analytics of network metrics data using AWS analytics and machine learning services such as Amazon Athena and Amazon SageMaker.
“The start of our 5G cloud core marks a decisive step in the transformation of our network architecture. We are proud to have the first fully cloud-native 5G core network deployed on AWS with a million subscribers already being served through it. As a leading mobile network operator with millions of customers in Germany, we want the most modern technology platform without making compromises on the functionality and reliability of our services. The new AWS Outposts racks harmonize with our next phase in our development of the network of the future, catering to the high throughput and low latency needs of our nationwide 5G core. AWS Outposts supports us to offer excellent 5G operational experiences, and enabling new digital applications for our customers.” said Mallik Rao, Chief Technology & Enterprise Officer (CTEO) of O2 Telefónica
“For modern cloud-native 5G Core networks, our customers demand a cloud architecture that meets high throughput processing requirements while ensuring simplified operations, enhanced security, and full automation. This drove our collaboration with AWS, leveraging the breadth of AWS services and Nokia’s industry leading telco expertise and commitment to automation to build the right solution. The new AWS Outposts racks enable porting and deploying Nokia’s 5G Core workloads on AWS services in customers’ data centers,” said Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia.
The new Outposts rack offering is currently in preview and will be generally available later this year.
AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud RAN workloads
The new AWS Outposts servers are designed from the ground up for Cloud RAN workloads, meeting the most stringent form factor, environmental, synchronization, transport latency and throughput requirements to host critical RAN DU workloads at the furthest edge such as RAN cell towers.
AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud RAN workloads enable telcos to leverage cloud infrastructure and services to deploy virtualized RAN solutions, accelerating 5G adoption and enabling new revenue-generating services. The servers are developed in collaboration with Nokia. AWS is also working with additional RAN vendors to integrate their accelerator cards as future options.
“Nokia and AWS work closely together to support the cloudification journey of mobile network operators and enterprises globally. We have a pre-integrated and proven Cloud RAN solution with the AWS Cloud and Nokia RAN software that ensures feature and performance consistency. We help operators enhance the efficiency and scalability of their 5G networks, as well as leverage the edge cloud for new monetization opportunities.” said Tommi Uitto, President of Nokia Mobile Networks.
Key benefits of the new AWS Outposts servers for telcos include:
- Reduced operational complexity with pre-integrated cloud infrastructure: The new AWS Outposts servers come with pre-integrated L1 acceleration card, hardware, operating system, and Container as a Service (CaaS), easing the operational burden of integrating, deploying, and managing multiple layers of the RAN infrastructure.
- Accelerated innovation with the broadest and deepest set of cloud capabilities: With AWS Outposts servers, telcos can seamlessly take advantage of over 200 AWS services in AWS Regions to develop new revenue-generating services. The new Outposts servers also simplify the migration from legacy infrastructure to a software-centric and microservice-based RAN, enabling frequent deployments of new services and features to a broad base of distributed cell sites.
- High performance and additional compute options with AWS Graviton3 processors: AWS Outposts servers for Cloud RAN workloads are powered by AWS Graviton3-based EC2 instances, delivering high compute performance and capacity as well as additional compute options for Cloud RAN and AI inference at the edge.
- Pre-Integrated with RAN vendors : By closely working with RAN vendors we deliver the high radio performance, feature parity, spectral, and energy efficiency from trusted radio vendors such as Nokia that are imperatives for any large scale 5G telco.
Telefonica, Orange, and Du Network will begin to build pilots for test validation later this year.
“This joint initiative aims to explore the potential of Cloud RAN integrated over a hybrid cloud architecture, powered by the Graviton chipset, which is a testimony of the progress made on portability and vendor diversification, enhancing flexibility in network deployment options for Orange. We are now collaborating on a lab trial with Nokia and AWS to showcase the performance, energy efficiency and automation benefits of the solution, which will serve as a cornerstone to feed into Orange Cloud RAN deployment strategy.” said Laurent Leboucher, Group CTO and EVP Networks at Orange.
The new Outposts server offering will be generally available later this year.
