AWS for Telecom’s Post

Transcript

- Welcome back to the AWS Studio. My name is Robbie Belson and we have another action packed agenda here talking about scaling voice networks on AWS. Great set of panelists here from Telstra, Nokia, and AWS respectively. Let's start with the round of intros over to you. - Shailin Sehgal, Telstra network and cloud executive, - Vishal Singh from Nokia look for global business for cloud and network services. - Umer Chaudhary from AWS responsible for the product management of Telco in EC2 Edge. - Wonderful. Thank you all for joining us. I think we should start with voice of customer, why we're here today. What got us started? If you could share a little bit more around what, what were some of the initial challenges that you were experiencing that really motivated this collaboration? - Well, that's a great question. So in the digital age, if you do not have your network, you pretty much can't do anything. You can't shop, you can't get an Uber, you can't get the education, you can't get online to work or otherwise. So we needed to have a fallback network that would allow for voice calls to continue. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. That's the first thing we are doing with AWS and Nokia. - Wonderful. And we hear this all the time from customers, right, Umer, around resiliency. This is an incredibly important topic. - Yeah, absolutely. That's something that we have been seeing around the world as well, that like creating a full, resiliency is extremely important as well. - And then from the Nokia perspective, as you build out solutions on AWS from you also seeing resiliency is an important topic from customers. - Yes, it is actually, you know, this is a topic which is being discussed here at AWS in fact, sorry, at MWC, in fact, almost all meetings we are talking about it. It's one of the most top of the mind topic. And also as we build cloud native software, it allows us to make it work on AWS and make it, you know, truly resilient in that, in making sure that we can fail over. - So as we think about the project at hand here, the ability to deploy an IMS core on AWS, can you talk to us a little bit more about the benefits that you expect to see? - Alright, the first thing first, I think it took 'em from conception to making the first call 40 days. So I think it's the speed of delivery and that's the cloud native nature of the software and the, the way the AWS is architected. So kudos to these two to making for making it happen that quickly. So speed of innovation, that was one. And then ensuring that we get customer experience continuity was the second thing that, that was important to us. - I really wanna hear from both of you around some of the benefits that you saw, but I'm really curious in terms of use cases, obviously making that first call being one of them, but Right. What else? - What else? Okay, so obviously when disaster strikes like it, it did in US a few days ago, unfortunately on one of the network, it's just not the voice service, it's the entire service is down. So you can't get data, you can't make phone calls, you can't access critical websites. So this is the tip of the iceberg, what we did with the voice. We wanna get into the data side of it too. - And so as we think about from an AWS perspective, Umer when the benefits that can be introduced by this resiliency, how does this align with our overall strategy? - Yeah, So I think there are few key things that AWS not only brings to the table as well, but really ties things together. Number one is the ability to provide a very reliable and resilient architecture, which is a multi availability zone in the regions. Then the auto-scaling capabilities that the Nokia cloud native applications can actually take care of. So that like, there's no manual intervention when any disaster happens, right? It can actually automatically scale out. The third one is that we have got, as you guys know, more than 750 types of EC2 instances. It means that like giving the ability to the customers to choose the right instance that is not only important enough from a technical nature, but also from a commercial nature. Then we extend the whole automation, cloud automation, through CI/CD pipelines, through cloud watch, through the observability to the end customer. And for this specific case, we actually brought two very specific features to the market. One is called the multi VPC attachment and the other is the EKS cluster support, extended support for the lifecycle management. And I think the most important thing, which ties it together is the ability to commercially provide a very viable solution so that like the hot standby always on is on some reserved instances kind of a deal, but when the traffic fails over, it's pay as you consume because it'll be there for a transient nature. So these are some of the things that like - To provide so clear technical benefits, auto-scaling, breath of instance type, multi VPC attachment, commercial benefits. But that's just one part. You've got the, you've got all the differentiation introduced by Nokia as well, right? - Correct. Absolutely. No application is where the secret sauce is. Correct. The fact is that, you know, when we, one is to do be on a cloud native journeys. Also, the second aspect is that, you know, your ability to really introduce features and capabilities and, and support services. Because obviously our idea is to make sure that, you know, the critical services are always up and running, you know, but then you can also introduce services on demand. And we have championed the cause of, as a service architecture right from the beginning almost, you know, so, and that has gone into this idea and working with AWS closely because that's where we can actually introduce this capability as a service to Telstra. That's very important to know. Correct. It's not just, it's a, it's an application as a service running on AWS where you can burst, you can scale and scale out, you can do quite a few things. - And as you think about that Telstra perspective, I know you're about to jump in there as a service strategy. Tell us about the vision. - Alright, so obviously the fallback network or the insurance network is the use case one. So we start with voice, we are gonna do data ip, but can you imagine what else can we do with it? So imagine the innovation that AWS can bring in, perhaps bring in a marketplace, bring in network as a service, API platform that sits on that network, and then our customers have ability to switch to that network via eSIM, for example, to get those services from, from AWS directly, I as Telstra enabling that, that journey. - And so it sounds like this ongoing collaboration is what you value most in cloud partners. - Absolutely. - Wonderful, wonderful. Maybe as we as, as we zoom out for a second, this is one great example of ways that of course AWS Nokia and Telstra can all come together to build something really, really unique. Umer looking ahead, like what do you, what are you, what are you most looking forward to? - Yeah, so I think first of all, what Shailin has mentioned is extremely important, really utilizing the network characteristics and exposing them as APIs for the wider developer community to consume and then build use cases that will be used for like a variety of like problem solving statements. But if we, if we also look at from a resiliency perspective, right? Because network resiliency is, it doesn't even stop, not only stops at the data center level, there's a whole IP backbone transport problems that need to be solved as well. And that's where I think there is a broader collaboration that we can do on the transport midhaul and the backhaul, as well as thinking further into the future into the Kuiper, our satellite program as well and how that can actually solve it. So there is, there's, it basically brings, brings an endless opportunities and that is very scalable. That's not only to one customer and one problem, it's globally applicable. So this partnership has a lot of significance. - I hope we have a chance to come back next year to hear more about it from the, from the Nokia perspective, how are we taking, how are you taking strides to really realize the vision that was just shared? - I think the vision was really the starting point and when we got together, we talked about it and, and the fact that we have in our own DNA, the capabilities that we've been building in terms of as a service and cloud native, it kind of came together very, very well. And you know, with, with AWS we have had the relationship of doing this in the past, so it was not a, you know, we are not experimenting between us and AWS we knew we can do it. We have done it in the past with Telstra's vision. We said, okay, let's go for it because it has, it lays us, as Umer was saying, it lays the foundation for many more things to do. And there are a lot of other service providers who are really watching this with very keen interest. And as I said, resiliency is a very, very big topic in, in this MWC and, you know, I'm quite excited to, to really go all the way and realize the potential of this vision. - Yeah, I can see everyone nodding here. The excitement and eagerness to do more is palpable. We often write in our signatures and emails, work hard, have fun, make history. I think it's exactly what we're doing here. So I wanna give you the final word from a Telstra perspective. What's next? Whatcha looking forward to? - Yeah, imagine I'm a Telstra customer today when I roam, like I'm here on MobiStar, imagine if I was still on Telstra with AWS's reach. So that'll be the final outcome that me-experiencing, same level of service that I experience in my country to anywhere I roam to. - Count me in. What a great discussion here today. Thank you all for joining us in the studio and hope to have you back next year. - Thank you. Thank you.