The purpose of Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint family is to specify a set of open APIs for Telco Edge Blueprints to expose towards Public Cloud Service Provider instances at the Edge. As Public Cloud Service Providers deploy Edge instances to better serve their end users and applications, Telco Edge deployments offer many opportunities for collaboration by exposing their network capabilities to provide value added services.
The need to interface and exchange information through these open APIs will allow competitive offerings for Consumers, Enterprises and Vertical Industry end-user segments. For instance, open APIs will be provided between Telcos and public cloud edge compute platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Anthos, AliCloud Edge Node Service (ENS), AWS Wavelength, Microsoft Azure Edge Zones, Tencent ECM, to name a few. These APIs are not limited to providing basic connectivity services but will include ability to deliver predictable data rate, predictable latency, reliability, service insertion, security, AI and RAN analytics, network slicing and more. These capabilities are needed to support a multitude of emerging applications such as AR/VR, Industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles, drones, Industry 4.0 initiatives, Smart Cities, Smart Ports. Other APIs will include exposure to edge orchestration and management, Edge monitoring (KPIs), and more. These open APIs will be foundation for service and instrumentation APIs when integrating with public cloud development environments and will be defined as part of the implementation. Even though these APIs will be common across all Telco operators, the differentiation will based on services provided through those APIs. The purpose of this blueprint family is to address all aspects of API interoperability to include API definition, API gateway functions (AAA, policy, security) so as to offer a secure, controllable, traceable, scalable and measurable way for accessing APIs by public edge cloud service providers.
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