The Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint provides Open APIs 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. Open API coverage includes edge capability exposure, edge orchestration and management, Edge monitoring (KPIs), and more.
The partnership announcement between AWS and Verizon/KDDI/SKTelecom/Vodafone during last November's AWS re'Invent signified the official entrance of Hyperscalers into the MEC domain. Over the last 12 months, AT&T has announced partnerships with the big 3 Hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud). In Asia, similar partnerships have formed between China Mobile and Tencent/Alibaba. It seems that after years of exploration, the MEC domain sees a viable business model where Hyperscalers bring in applications and end users, while the mobile network operators leverage their edge capabilities and locations.
Telcos and Hyperscalers are powerful in their respective domains. How would their partnerships work when they meet at the edge ? What would be the technical collaboration interfaces? Within each country usually there are M operators with overlapping coverage and N Hyperscalers serving the same areas. With this M to N mesh relationship, would it make sense to have common interfaces ? Hyperscalers are big on APIs – how would Telco network edge capabilities be exposed as APIs? There are many questions. However there are no ready made answers.
Needless to say, business relationships of all MEC players is equally important in this domain. Telcos and Hyperscalers both carry their own eco-systems. How these eco-systems would collaborate poses another challenge.
This blueprint project family intends to help find these answers. The project will showcase collaboration via case studies. Meanwhile, broader discussions will be held with telcos and Hyperscalers during the project phase. With the massive deployment of 5G in coming years, MEC is not only a location play, but also a network capability play. The game for Telco Edge starts to get interesting.
Use Case Details:
Attributes | Description | Informational |
Type | New | |
Industry Sector | Cloud, Telco | |
Business driver | Public Cloud Service Providers are deploying Edge instances to better serve their end users and applications, A multitude of these applications require close inter-working with Telco Edge deployments to provide predictable latency & throughput, reliability and other telco-grade requirements. The purpose of this blueprint family is to specify a standard set of APIs to expose towards Public Cloud Service Provider instances at the Edge. | |
Business use cases | Telco Edge deployments can provide APIs to support capabilities such as the following
| |
Business Cost - Initial Build Cost Target Objective | The API platform (Gateway, SDK) will be deployed as cloud native containerized technology using Kubernetes. | |
Business Cost – Target Operational Objective | The APIs will be exposed and published to external public cloud service providers and application developers in a secure, controllable, traceable, scalable, and measurable way. | |
Security need | Northbound API platform (Gateway) will provide AAA, ACL, Policy enforcement functions. Southbound APIs that are used to call the core network functions of Telco will follow all the security requirements of 5G/4G core. | |
Regulations | N/A | |
Other restrictions | N/A | |
Additional details | N/A |
Case Attributes | Description | Informational |
Type | New | |
Blueprint Family - Proposed Name | Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint Family | |
Use Case | Telco Edge deployments can provide APIs to support capabilities such as the following
| |
Blueprint proposed Name | Public Cloud Edge API Gateway | |
Initial POD Cost (capex) | 1 x86/Arm server, 4G/5G radio, switch | |
Scale & Type | x86/Arm servers + FPGA acceleration | |
Applications | Value-added capabilities of operators to open up, e.g.
Different applications will trigger different APIs. | |
Power Restrictions | N/A | |
Infrastructure orchestration | OS : Ubuntu 16.x, Centos7 VM: Airship, ONAP Containers: K8s | |
SDN | OVS-DPDK, SR-IOV | |
Workload Type | VMs, Containers | |
Additional Details | Need 4G/5G radio environment for POD |
Committer | Committer Company | Committer Contact Info | Committer Bio | Committer Picture | Self Nominate for PTL (Y/N) |
| China Mobile | gusu@chinamobile.com | ||||
| Tencent | allenwchen@tencent.com | ||||
| Changming Bai | Alibaba | hangming.bcm@alibaba-inc.com | |||
| Bruce Li | Alibaba | bruce.lxc@alibaba-inc.com | |||
| Oleg Berzin | Equinix | oberzin@equinix.com | |||
| James Li | China Mobile | ||||
| Kandan Kathirvel | AT&T | kk0563@att.com | |||
| Dan Druta | AT&T | dd5826@att.com | |||
| Tina Tsou | Arm | tina.tsou@arm.com | |||
| Guo Chen | China Unicom | cheng96@chinaunicom.cn | |||
| Deepak Kataria |
Contributor | Contributor Company | Contributor Contact Info | Contributor Bio | Contributor Picture |
| Jeff Brower | ||||
| Jane Shen |