Cloud-Native Oriented Telecom Cloud Integration

With the introduction of 5G service-based architecture, the growing desire of operators for rapid launch of new services and digital-intelligent transformation, as well as the maturity of cloud native in the IT field, telecom cloud is gradually evolving from virtualization to cloudification and then to cloud native.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines cloud native as a collection of technologies including containers, microservices, service meshes, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs. The introduction of these technologies in the telecom field means:

• Microservice and containerization of the applications can facilitate rapid iteration, deployment and launch, and accelerate service innovation.
• Operators and software providers gradually shift their focus from running applications in the resource pool in the cloud phase to service logic functions of the applications in the cloud native phase, thus devoting limited manpower and capital to core service competitiveness to maximize profits in digital and intelligent transformation.

After the preliminary use of the above technologies in the Cloud Native 1.0 phase, CNCF and telecom sectors have begun to explore the possibilities of Cloud Native 2.0:

• Introduce a large number of new technologies, including orchestration and management, security and monitoring, big data and artificial intelligence, database and storage, and network acceleration. These new technologies cover a full lifecycle of cloud native telecoms and form a complete technical chain.
• Deploy hardware acceleration down to the cloud platform, abstract the capabilities of heterogeneous resource pools, and enable applications after the emergence of iPaaS and lots of public services, so that the applications no longer need to care about infrastructure differences.

Through the above development, the full-stack digital platform capability from infrastructure to service enablement can be implemented in the telecom cloud scenario. This helps operators and software providers build an agile, automatic, secure and trusted, and highly reliable service operation environment, liberating personnel from complex infrastructure O&M and focusing on service provision.

The evolution of telecom cloud to Cloud Native 2.0 is almost a qualitative change compared with the cloud phase. This brings more changes and challenges to telecom cloud integration. The continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) of applications becomes a must and cornerstone, based on which an end-to-end integration automation can be implemented. It should support hybrid deployment of CT and IT applications, as well as different deployment forms such as containers, VMs, and bare metal. It should support deployment in different areas (at the center or edge data centers) and in different networking environments, and also support new and old hardware, different cloud platforms, and different versions of cloud platforms.

The prerequisites for addressing these challenges include but are not limited to:

• The application itself should support containerization and orchestration, implement stateless design independent of the cloud platform, and support grayscale upgrade.
• A strong enough integration platform or automatic tool sets must be provided to deploy, configure, test, and upgrade on underlying hardware and network, cloud platform/infrastructure, and upper applications.

GitOps is a deployment model introduced to meet the above requirements. It breaks down an application into an image and a description template for deployment. Based on the template, a deployment configuration is manually generated to implement automatic application deployment, so that the application is insensitive to cloud infrastructure. Based on this concept, the CNCF's Nephio project proposes automation based on K8S Operator in the telecom field from cloud infrastructure to applications. This deployment mode enables CI/CD of applications under the same infrastructure, partially meeting the requirements of telecom cloud integration in the cloud-native 2.0 scenario.

iStream is a telecom cloud integration solution proposed by ZTE based on digital integration for the cloud native 2.0 scenario (Fig. 1). Unlike the GitOps and Nephio modes, the ZTE iStream solution supports automatic generation of application deployment descriptors, and automatic configuration of hardware and underlay networks, thereby implementing automatic adjustment (such as splitting and aggregation) of a hardware environment required by an application and a cloud.

In the ZTE iStream solution:

• Instantiation configuration can be generated automatically to truly implement end-to-end automatic integration.
• With automatic configuration of hardware and underlay networks, the applications can be automatically deployed in different networking environments, different hardware environments, the environments having different hardware requirements (such as SR-IOV, RAID modes, and BFD protocols), or different cloud platforms, so as to truly realize one-time integration and multi-environment deployment of the applications.
• CI/CD of the hardware, underlay networks, and cloud platforms can be achieved.
• Different environments can be automatically deployed in accordance with the actual requirements of hardware, clouds, and applications.

Based on the ZTE iStream solution, ZTE can provide a variety of capabilities to meet operator needs of telecom cloud integration in different scenarios:

• The application follows the cloud: Different versions of applications can be automatically deployed in different cloud-compatible environments.
• The cloud follows the hardware: Different versions of the cloud can be automatically deployed in different hardware and underlay network environments to avoid hardware compatibility of the cloud platform or hardware differences in different areas.
• The cloud follows the application: Different cloud environments can be automatically deployed in accordance with the compatibility requirements of the applications.

The ZTE iStream solution based on digital integration can basically meet the needs of telecom cloud integration under the cloud native 2.0 architecture. ZTE will continue to pay attention to the long-term evolution of cloud native for telecoms and improve this solution. Also, it will consider promoting the implementation of this solution in CNCF, realize sharing within the industry, and jointly building the integration of telecom cloud.