Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Edge is Here; Edge to Multi-Cloud is Next
By Laurent Marchand, CEO, CTO, Founder at Kaloom
The edge is definitely
here, with edge computing expected
to be a $700 billion industry by 2028. 5G will enable emerging applications at the
edge such as AR/VR, IIoT, remote medicine and more, empowering service
providers to think beyond a mobile consumer revenue model. However, 5G also pushes
an immense amount of data to the network edge. Enterprises and service providers
are struggling because legacy edge architecture cannot handle the mounting
heterogeneity and diverse performance requirements of emerging applications.
This is compounded by the familiar constraints of edge infrastructure,
including space, cooling and power budget limitations. Amid these challenges, Enterprises
and service providers are hungry for Edge to multi-cloud functionality. Consolidation,
Services Function Chaining, Hardware acceleration and direct connectivity from
the edge to any cloud platform will allow enterprises and service providers to surmount
these challenges and accelerate services from the edge to multi-cloud.
1.
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud will reign
The numbers are in; hybrid cloud solutions are vital.
According to a
recent survey by IBM, 77 percent of business leaders have implemented hybrid cloud infrastructure
and 71 percent see hybrid cloud as crucial to digital transformation. Through
the adoption of hybrid cloud, companies can leverage a mix of public and
private cloud infrastructure to lower costs and ensure low latency connectivity,
optimized security and high availability in their edge infrastructure. In 2023,
multi-cloud will become a reality as well. Companies will no longer rely on a
single cloud provider for their IT infrastructure. They will use a combination
of multiple public cloud providers and their own edge compute infrastructure for
the private cloud portion.
Open ecosystems help network vendors interoperate
efficiently to reduce operational costs. But companies will increasingly apply
this multi-vendor mindset to their cloud infrastructure. No single vendor
solution, including public cloud provider solutions, can satisfy the requirements
of today's digital economy. Edge-native software that enables hardware
acceleration and provides direct connectivity from the edge to any cloud
provider will be crucial to this shift. In 2023, companies that understand this
will no longer be at the mercy of a single cloud provider. This understanding
will allow them to rapidly implement the most cost-effective multi-cloud strategy
and infrastructure suited to their needs.
2. The rise of
infrastructure processing units
With conventional servers, service providers must
run all tenants, cloud service provider (CSP) software, load balancers,
firewalls and more in the general purpose CPU. If you have a limited number of
servers and you're using 30-40 percent of each server for infrastructure
services rather than customer applications, you're in trouble. The compute requirements
of these services are heightened with 5G, requiring a complete 5G packet core
and terabit-scale processing in functions such as the user plane function
(UPF). With conventional processing methods, you'd need a hundred servers just
for the 5G UPF.
Infrastructure processing units (IPUs) will see
rapid deployment because they address these challenges and transform how
servers operate. As they strive to accelerate services from the edge to
multi-cloud, service providers will offload CSP infrastructure software
functions to IPUs and intelligent network fabrics instead of traditional
switch fabrics and general purpose CPUs. This means that only monetizable tenant
applications will run on the CPU and tenants will have access to 100 percent of
the processing power available from hardware such as Xeon processors, marking a
clear division between CSP and tenant workloads. This functionality will help
service providers reduce the Total Cost of Ownership while ensuring most
resources are open for monetization.
3. Disaggregation,
network slicing and service function chaining will become vital
As we head into 2023, service providers will
increasingly leverage disaggregated, best of breed solutions that reduce single
vendor reliance while reducing costs.
This will be further complemented by network slicing and service
function chaining, all managed by overlay network management & Orchestration.
End-to-end network slicing will enable monetization of applications at the edge,
improving the ROI of 5G edge infrastructure. Slicing cuts physical data centers
into virtualized, distributed data centers to serve the varying requirements of
differentiated services. This capability facilitates fully isolated, end-to-end
data transfer that is optimized for specific business purposes, empowering
providers with multi-tenancy. Service function chaining will prove crucial as
well, enabling service providers to consolidate multiple functions into one
network that is more easily managed and orchestrated to deliver end-to-end
services.
An innovative approach to the user plane function
(UPF) will also
maximize 5G investment. Through open ecosystem implementation and
interoperability, Kaloom, Red Hat and Intel recently
innovated a new design for the UPF that provides the terabit performance
required by data-hungry 5G applications. This 5G UPF is enabled by
disaggregated, heterogeneous architecture and achieved through a cloud-native
foundation for 5G network functions. This achievement signifies the continuing
trend of a cloud-native, automated, fully
programmable edge enabled by disaggregation and virtualized network
functions. We see
this trend continuing in 2023.
One interesting facet of all this edge
transformation is that it will not happen overnight. For example, containers are
a popular method to improve on the shortcomings of virtual machines (VM). But
service providers will see the necessity of technology that allows their legacy
VM to run on top of the container platform in the same environment for added
cost savings. Containers will not replace legacy VM infrastructure immediately,
so interoperability and transformation will remain a priority.
Multi-cloud: the future of edge computing
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud infrastructure will allow
companies to move beyond the consumption of public cloud services while
monetizing emerging applications at the edge. There is still plenty of work
ahead, and edge infrastructure transformation is a lengthy process with
long-term benefits. Regardless of where you fit in the ecosystem, acceleration
of services from the edge to multi-cloud will prove pivotal to enabling the
next phase of our digital economy.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurent Marchand has over 25 years of
experience in
telecom and networking technologies. Laurent is a prolific inventor and
entrepreneur with expertise in telecom network architecture, mobile
infrastructure and data centers. He is a member of "Ordre des Ingénieurs du
Québec" and a graduate in Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal. He
is the CEO and Founder of Kaloom, a software solution company enabling service providers
and enterprises to accelerate services from Edge to Multi-Cloud.