All brands and products are the trademarks of their ...€¦ · According to Telcos, OpenStack and ONAP are two of the Open Source projects which will be most relevant for 5G SLOW!

1All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder/s. Copyright Decisive Media Limited. All rights reserved.

According to Telcos, OpenStack and ONAP are two of the Open Source projects which

will be most relevant for 5G

SLOW!Transformation

ahead

of Telcos think they should be ‘in the driving seat’ in order to speed up the perceived slow pace of Network Transformation68%

of Telcos felt the increased focus on Open Source was mixed – with it being easier for Tier 1’s61%

What frustrates you most about OpenStack?

Avoiding vendor lock-in 42%Speed to market 21% Improving innovation 15%Save money 10%

WHAT ARE THE MAIN MOTIVATORS FOR TELCOS TO EMBRACE OPEN SOURCE?

...how important Cloud Native will become

18% of Telcos not sure...

Tier 2 & 3

of Telcos are using OpenStack

now or in the near future91%

of Telcos believe Transformation

is not moving fast enough61%

HONKHONKHO

NK

HONKHONK

Inability to patch

Inability to version control Inability to

capacity plan

39% 39% 22%

of Telcos favoured a hybrid approach of at least two of Virtual Machines, Containers and Bare Metal46%

ROAD UNDERCONSTRUCTION

of Telcos said there are too many Open Source projects73%

You have reached your destination

5G

OpenStack33% Kubernetes

24%ONAP 40%

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE VMWARE INTEGRATED OPENSTACK SOLUTION

www.vmware.com/openworks

Tier 1 only

OPENSTACK FOR TELCOWHERE TO NOW?

SURVEY

SPONSORED BY


OPEN SOURCE, OPENSTACK AND NFV: HOW IS THE ‘OPEN TELCO’ PROJECT PROGRESSING? Sponsored by Intel and VMware

The objective of this opinion survey was to unlock some insights into telecoms professionals’ attitudes and experiences around OpenStack, Open Source software and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). These three software projects are arguably the key observable pieces in Telcos’ movement to what we might call the ‘Open Telco’. Notice also that we successfully avoided use of the word ‘transformation’ because of that concept’s abstract nature. Asking about specific projects of which our viewers and readers have direct experience, is a better and more instructive route to take.

We also asked questions about Open Source in relation to 5G.

As with all TelecomTV surveys our goal wasn’t to surface hard data about the prospects for these technologies in terms of market sizes or their pace of introduction. That sort of information is the province of market researchers and analysts using very different techniques. Our surveys explore subjective attitudes and expectations amongst our readers and viewers on specific issues. Effectively, we’re asking individuals, whose opinions are their own, what they think is ‘really’ going on under the corporate hood. We hope the result is a useful snapshot of industry sentiment. For instance, one of the long-running controversies in telecoms in recent years has concerned the pace of the NFV framework and standards-setting. Some observers maintain it’s been too slow, others that it was too broad in its approach, others that, like the bears’ porridge, it’s been about right.

Standards always take too long to formulate, especially according to those who were not involved in the process. But with the development of NFV we saw the controversial introduction of open source into the telecoms sphere.

So is Open Source the savior of NFV or the villain behind its alleged slow-down? And how do attitudes toward Open Source software now stand within the telecoms industry?

OpenStack is being hailed as the settled choice for the telco cloud. What are its drawbacks and advantages? What is liked and not liked?

5G is also naturally important here since shifting its data about in a differentiated way looks like being one of the main tasks for the new, open and agile network.

Notes: · Instead of repeating the definitive but unwieldy ‘Network Operators / Service Providers’, we’ll call the category

‘Telcos’ in the text.

· We make important comparisons between the full survey results and just the Telcos. So for brevity we call them ‘Telcos’ and ‘Full Survey’ and we put them in italics.

· We’ll round up or down the percentages to the nearest integer.

· Where we refer to a prescribed answer to one of our questions, we will Italicize it. e.g. In Question 2, OpenStack might be used Now or Not at all.

Our survey respondents:

· Nearly half of our respondents are Network Operators / Service Providers.

· System Integrators and Ecosystem OEM/ Vendors together comprised about a third.

· 7% were VNF providers and our small number of ‘others’ were Analysts, Researchers, and Software Vendors.


SECTION 1: WHAT DO WE ALL THINK OF OPENSTACK?

ARE YOU USING OPENSTACK IN PRODUCTION TODAY OR IN THE NEAR FUTURE?

HEALTH WARNING: It must be borne in mind that as this was actively promoted as an OpenStack survey, and since the respondents were self-selecting we can assume that OpenStack users were likely to be in the vast majority.

Just over half of our respondents declared their companies current users of OpenStack with the Telcos alone returning almost exactly the same proportion, so in this case there was no divergence between the Full Survey and Telcos specifically. However the proportion of Telcos ‘not at all’ using OpenStack was just 9% while for the Full Survey it was 15%. This makes sense: some Full Survey respondents might count themselves competitors to OpenStack or in the case of analysts, for example, would find the question not applicable.

IF NOW OR IN THE NEAR FUTURE, PLEASE TELL US BRIEFLY HOW YOU ARE ALREADY USING (OR SOON INTENDING TO USE) OPENSTACK

There’s a full list of answers to this question in our Appendix A. As you would expect the answers here were diverse. What we assume were integrators and/or vendors were naturally able to sum up the usage they were seeing with their customers. Many Telcos are apparently using different ‘flavors’ of OpenStack (Ericsson, Red Hat, Huawei etc.) for different environments (e.g. one in the lab and one in the cloud).

Mentions include: OpenStack being viewed as the de facto standard for the Telco cloud; on virtual IMS and virtual EPC platforms; IoT edge; as well as it being applied in support of all functions, often expressed as NFVI (network functions virtualized infrastructure).

PLEASE TELL US BRIEFLY WHICH VNFS YOU ARE USING OR INTEND TO USE

The favourites here appear to be virtual IMS (vIMS); virtual EPC (vEPC); virtual CPE (vCPE); virtual Domain Name Server (vDNS); SD-WAN and VPNs. Again, a full list is at the end of this report as Appendix B.

ARE THE VNFS YOU ARE USING PART OF A MULTI-VENDOR DEPLOYMENT?

Multi-vendor deployments were the overwhelming choice across the board. Telcos gave it a 75% yes, 25% no, while the Full Survey went even further, returning close to an 80/20 ratio.

No

Yes

25

22

7875

70%50%40%30%20%10%0% 60% 80%

Not at all

In the near future (3 - 9 months)

In Proof of Concept project

60%50%40%30%20%10%0%

159

2723

13

15

5147

Now

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


DO YOU CONTRIBUTE CODE TO OPENSTACK?

Code contribution to OpenStack hovered around nearly 40% for the Full Survey, just 25% for Telcos. This divergence is probably to be expected. Vendors are, for obvious reasons, anxious to participate in open source projects such as OpenStack as the open source approach becomes accepted by their customers. But that only a quarter of Telcos claim to be contributing is not a surprise given the commitment required and the ‘relative’ newness of open source and OpenStack in the networking environment.

On the other hand, open source proponents in the industry stress the necessity for Telcos to get involved and contribute code if they want to make a success of their technological transformation. Being passive technology recipients, it’s implied, is a recipe for a half-hearted transformation, while participating in writing and contributing code, tends to get the whole team signed up to the chosen technological course and more committed to making the technical transformation a success.

On that basis the 75% non-participation rate for Telcos might be seen as something that needs to be improved and probably will be improved as time goes on. But it may also be a sign that smaller or more focused Telcos naturally find it more difficult to contribute specialist staff to open source group activity.

WHAT FRUSTRATES YOU MOST ABOUT OPENSTACK?

The inability to version control was named top OpenStack frustration to a far higher degree amongst the ‘non Telco’ participants in the survey, resulting in a score of 42% for the Full Survey. Telcos however, scored Inability to version control at 39% while 39% also selected inability to patch as top bugbear. The inability to capacity plan was nominated by just 26% across the board.

PLEASE EXPLAIN BRIEFLY WHAT YOU LIKE ABOUT OPENSTACK?

The full list of comments on OpenStack can be found below in Appendix 3. The general sense is that OpenStack has can be thought of as a de facto standard open source player with real momentum. It’s experienced very little fragmentation and is considered more stable than its peers. One contributor says it provides a common platform for all the Tier 1 Telcos to collaborate around; another that OpenStack participation provides the sense of belonging to a global community. To quote one respondent, “It’s open, it lets me avoid proprietary vendor lock-in and gives me freedom to negotiate on VNF without having a gun held to my head.”

No

Yes

61

75

3925

70%50%40%30%20%10%0% 60% 80%

39

39

22

30%20%10%0% 40% 50%

Inability to patch32

Inability to version control42

Inability to capacity plan26

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


SECTION 2: WHAT DO WE ALL THINK OF OPEN SOURCE?

HOW IMPORTANT DO YOU THINK OPEN SOURCE IS OR WILL BECOME TO THE TELECOMS SECTOR? WHICH STATEMENT IS CLOSEST TO YOUR OPINION?

The difference between Telcos and the rest really becomes apparent with this question. While just over a third of Telcos (34%) are enthusiastic enough to mark open source as absolutely crucial; the industry overall is more restrained with the greater number (32%) saying it will play a substantial part.

WHICH STATEMENT IS CLOSEST TO YOUR OPINION - THE INCREASING FOCUS ON OPEN SOURCE IN TELECOMS HAS BEEN BAD, MIXED OR GOOD?

Both Telcos and Full Survey think Open Source has been far more a savior for NFV than an impediment. However Telcos proved more likely than the rest to find its influence mixed.

3032

30

34

2321

It’s important in some areas, to be avoided in others

...Open what?

10

12

3

3

25%15%10%0% 30% 35%

It has a place, but I believe there are still problems with using it in the network

20%5%

It will play a substantial role in the industry

It’s absolutely crucial

41Mixed, is working for some big telcos, but

is not so easy to embrace for tier 2 and 3 with less in-house resource

Bad, has slowed down the development of NFV

49

10

50%30%20%0% 60% 70%

Good, open source has saved the NFV development effort

40%10%

6

61

33

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


HOW WELL DO YOU THINK THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY UNDERSTANDS THE NEEDS OF TELECOMS?

A fairly even spread of opinion for Question 10 with most of the Full Survey taking a ‘middle’ position with understands it somewhat, although Telcos liked the ‘understands it somewhat’ more than the Full Survey did.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE MAIN MOTIVATORS FOR TELCOS TO EMBRACE OPEN SOURCE?

Avoiding lock-in is, as ever, perceived as the main Telco draw to open source software. Not surprisingly Telcos are significantly more attached to lock-in avoidance than the Full survey. Speed to market is the second favorite for Telcos; saving money is second favorite for the Full Survey. Other motivations posited by respondents included ‘risk reduction’; ‘improving innovation’; ‘collaboration’ and ‘joining a community of developers’.

15

13

3

10

Lower cost products

Speed to market

Avoiding vendor lock-in

Industry collaboration

Save money

42

36

35%25%20%15%5% 10%0% 40% 45%

Accessing a broader talent pool

Unifying telcos around a common approach

30%

Improving innovation

Other (please specify)

6

9

21

11

3

3

4

0

00

14

10

24

15

14

18

44

51

2 - It barely understands it

1 - The community doesn’t understand Open Source at all

12

10

6

6

40%20%10%0% 50% 60%

3 - It understands it somewhat

30%

4 - It understands it quite well

5 - It perfectly understands it

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


ARE THERE TOO MANY OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS?

Both Telcos and the Full Survey are strongly in favor of there being fewer open source projects and see the value of them being pulled under an umbrella organization, a significant minority (29%) are happy for there to remain as many or more open source projects.

HOW WELL DO YOU FEEL YOU UNDERSTAND THE TERM “CLOUD NATIVE”?

Most in the industry think they understand cloud native - nearly a quarter say they understand it perfectly. Very few individuals admit to not getting or barely understanding it. 39% of Telcos admit they understand it only somewhat while the Full Survey claims a greater degree of understanding with 36% choosing understand it quite well.

HOW IMPORTANT DO YOU THINK “CLOUD NATIVE” IS OR WILL BECOME WITHIN NFV? WHICH STATEMENT IS CLOSEST TO YOUR OPINION?

Most may feel they understand it, but the jury is still out on exactly how crucial Cloud Native is going to be. Nearly half our respondents took the middle position where cloud native has a place but more work is needed; with nearly twice as many Not sure’s in the Telco camp than in the Full Survey camp.

41

39

It has a place, but there’s a lot of work still to do

Not sure how important it will become

49

43

10

18

40%30%0% 50%

It’s clear its adoption will be crucial to the NFV effort

10% 20%

21

36

23

21

34

39

2 - I barely understand it

1 - I don’t understand Cloud Native at all

4

10

3

3

35%20%10% 15%5%0% 40% 45%

3 - I understand it somewhat

30%25%

4 - I understand it quite well

5 - I perfectly understand it

No, the more the better

Yes - more of them should be pooled together under “umbrella” organisations, such as the

Linux Foundation’s LF Networking

29

27

71

73

70%50%40%30%20%10%0% 60% 80%

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


IS NETWORK TRANSFORMATION (THE MOVE TO VIRTUALIZATION, NFV, SDN, ETC.) WITHIN TELCOS PROCEEDING FAST ENOUGH FOR TELCOS TO OFFER THE NECESSARY NEW, AGILE, AUTOMATED SERVICES NEEDED FOR THEM TO COMPETE?

The No’s won this by a considerable margin, although there were fewer No’s amongst the Telcos.

IF NO TO THE QUESTION ABOVE - TO WHAT DO YOU ATTRIBUTE THE SLOW PACE?

PICKED BY % OF RESPONDENTS

The slow pace wasn’t put down to any fault of the technology (technology not appropriate only got ticks from around 22%). Rather the Telcos were deemed at fault in one way or another, with the Telcos aren’t innovative by nature option being the favorite. Not surprisingly Telcos themselves thought it was more down to them not driving the process sufficiently, which might be seen as a Telco-friendly way of saying the same thing.

36

48

34

45

68

44

The approach suits the very large telcos best - tier two and three don’t have the in-house

resource to make best use of it

Technology not appropriate for telecom - comes from a different tradition

22

13

22

18

40%20%10%0% 50% 80%

Telcos need to drive the process more, not let vendors set the pace

30%

Telcos aren’t innovative by nature and their employees are resistant to change

Telcos find it hard to attract top engineering and software talent

60% 70%

About right

No

33

39

6761

70%50%40%30%20%10%0% 60%

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


SECTION 3: HOW IMPORTANT DO WE THINK OPEN SOURCE WILL BE FOR 5G?

WHICH OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS WILL BE MOST RELEVANT FOR 5G?

Interesting divergence: Kubernetes was the majority pick for the Full Survey while OpenStack and ONAP were the strong favorites for Telcos.

WHICH FORM FACTOR DO YOU THINK WILL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT FOR 5G WORKLOADS?

Containers were the top individual choice, but Telcos and the Full Survey both considered a Hybrid of at least two of the options was most likely for 5G.

31

36

54

46

9

12

Bare metal6

6

30%10%5%0% 60%

Virtual Machines

Containers

Hybrid (some sort of combination of the below)

50%40%20%

37

24

33

33

3

4

ONAP26

40

OSM

Kubernetes

OpenStack

25%10%5%0% 30% 45%20% 35% 40%

Full Survey Telcos

Full Survey Telcos


SECTION 4: TAKEAWAYS

What might we have gleaned from the results of this survey? While industry sentiment towards Open Source in general appears to have become more positive than they were even three or four years ago, there are still some strong caveats.

For instance, the perception of a slow introduction of NFV is assigned an interesting mixture of causes - while the move to Open Source NFV is blamed by some in our sample for this, the majority of our Full Survey participants find that, if there is a slow-down, Telcos themselves are, not so much to blame, but are finding the transition difficult for cultural and other reasons.

When it comes to Open Source as a corporate culture, Telcos don’t always appear to be throwing their weight (and their skilled employees) behind it in terms of code contribution. That may yet come.

We found OpenStack was being used (or soon to be used) by over half of the Full Survey and that there was a high degree of enthusiasm for it as the de facto standard for telco cloud.

Great things are expected of Open Source generally with just over a third of Telcos calling it absolutely crucial.

Having said that, all respondents think there are currently too many Open Source projects ongoing, a view widely shared. It’s been noticeable that umbrella organisations like the Linux Foundation have recently been consolidating them and coordinating their activities.

So in conclusion, Open Source is on the final stages of a journey towards greater acceptance amongst Telcos. The next ‘crucial’ technology staging post may be the adoption of ‘cloud native’ another technology deemed highly interesting, but with work still to do.


APPENDIX 1. VNFS RESPONDENTS ARE USING OR INTEND TO BE USING

Responses

· Service layer on top of VM.

· vFW and vDNS

· Our customers are using vCPE, vFw, vDNS, vPCRF. And intend to use vIMS,

· vEPC, vIMS, vCPE, and etc.

· vIMS, vEPC

· EPC, FW, vIMS, vBNG, vUDC and vDPI

· vEPC, vIMS, vUDC

· vCSCF/BGCF, vTAS, vMRF

· Messaging & USSD

· OSM integration

· Telco VNF (vPC, DNS, DHCP, Security etc.)

· Packet core

· vRouter, vADC, Security Gateway

· vEPC

· Proxy, DPI, Firewall, VPN, Apps

· SD-WAN; Firewall; router; SBC; Performance measurement; security

· All network functions

· We have an ecosystem of 40+ VNFs on-boarded into our solution. These VNFs cover the range of functions from enterprise class solutions (routers, firewalls, SD-WAN, WAN Opt, etc.) as well as telco class solutions (SBC, LTE-EPC, IMS, etc.).

· EPC, MME HSS

· Telco VNF: VOLTE,EPC,EMS etc.

· vEPC, HSS/HLS and all access functions at the mobile network, support functions grafana, graphite, influx, and other monitoring automating tools. Huawei and RedHat

· Firewall, load balancer, router, EPC, IMS, vRAN

· Epc, voicemail

· vPE, vFW, EPG, DNS, etc.

· EPC, IMS, CRAN, SBC, etc.

· EPC

· All VNFs - EPC, CPE, FW, Router, DPI, etc.

· IMS and UGW

· Network elements, security and IT network

· vEPC

· Benu


ABBREVIATIONS & NUMBER OF MENTIONS

· vDNS - Virtual Domain Name System (2)

· vEPC - Virtual Evolved Packet Core (15)

· vCPE - Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (3)

· vPCRF - Virtual Policy and Charging Rules Function

· vIMS - Virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (9)

· vBNG - Vitual Broadband Network Gateway (1)

· vUDC - Virtual Universal Data Connector (1)

· vDPI - Virtual Deep Packet Inspection (2)

· vFW - Virtual Fire Wall - [3]

· vCSCF - Virtual Call Session Control Function

· BGCF - Breakout Gateway Control Function

· vTAS - Virtual Telephone Answering Service

· vMRF - Virtual Media Resource Function

· DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

· OSM - Open Source MANO

· vADC - Virtual Application Delivery Control

· SBC - Switching and Bridging Control

· SD-WAN - Software Defined Wide Area Network

· MME - Mobility Management Entity

· HSS - Home Subscriber Server

· HLS - HTTP Live Streaming?

· VoLTE - Voice over LTE

· vRAN - Virtual Radio Access Network

· EPG - Electronic Programme Guide

· CRAN - Cloud Radio Access Network


APPENDIX 2. WHAT RESPONDENTS LIKED ABOUT OPENSTACK

Responses

· Interop and openness · Controller · After Linux, OpenStack is the key opensource technology that gave Opensource

movement the momentum. · It’s open · Open Source and De Facto Standard · Still some years to go before it gains consensus · The single API · The idea · Good for NFV · It’s a fairly mature and broadly adopted Open Source community, less

fragmentation and more stable than others. · It is open source and coming new platform of choice by all sectors. · OpenStack provides a common platform for all the Tier 1 Telco’s to

collaborate around. · Opensource · Everything: that it’s an opensource, user-led effort. · I like feeling of belonging to a global community based on motivation · It is the best platform for virtualization and is production proven and ready. · Provides a valuable suite of component services that can be used to deploy

and manage cloud infrastructure. It provides a common, open and transportable framework to facilitate multi-vendor NFV solutions.

· Open; growing contributors; industry wide support · OpenStack is a collection of projects where various members can contribute to

make it feature rich, and moreover it does not create vendor lock-in. Also, time to market for the new feature offering is considerably less

· Open Architecture, Open Source, Open Mind · Improving innovations the way for devops agile development. Avoiding vendor

lock-in, standard open api and platform · No vendor lock-in to VNFs. Vast community. Wide choice of networking

architectures. · It’s open, it lets me avoid proprietary vendor lock-in and gives me freedom

to negotiate on VNF’s without having a gun held to my head. · Dynamic infrastructure management · Great way to manage my infrastructure and completely open · Open · I like open · The single API


APPENDIX 3: HOW RESPONDENTS ARE ALREADY USING (OR SOON INTENDING TO USE) OPENSTACK

Responses

· For 5G orchestration as base layer to ETSI MANO.

· For deploying different web application in each VM instances.

· Using AWS and Azure to replace/augment OpenStack in ONAP

· Our customers globally are using it as a Telco Cloud Infrastructure. From our experience, it is more of a de-facto for Telco Cloud implementations.

· not publicly available

· For NFV use cases at all relevant locations

· Using Mirantis OpenStack in Cloud infrastructure and Redhat OpenStack in the lab

· For NFVI

· Mirantis as VIM in our Telco cloud NFVi stack.

· vIMS for VoWifi Service, vertically integrated Huawei version of Openstack, Ericsson version of Openstack - vHSS/AAA/HLR

· NFV

· For Virtual IMS and EPC platforms.

· ETSI 5G MANO

· CUPS, vEPC, IOT edge apps

· Over 100k cores in use today for our network cloud

· OpenStack and OpenDaylight are very closely aligned.

· We have telco VNF running on Redhat OpenStack

· Nuetron integrator, Overlay Management. VNF Management.

· In cloud platform products and in analytics products

· As a key infrastructure layer and a strong base for virtualization

· Base software for our Network Cloud

· We provide an NFVI operating system solution that embeds OpenStack as the cloud platform. Our solution provides a high-performance virtualization environment that enables multi-vendor VNFs.

· Foundation for NFVI

· OpenStack is being used as an infrastructure for the deployment of Telco VNF

· Intending to use OpenStack to manage VNFs on public CSPs.

· NFVI


· SDN/NFV - Orchestration Platform

· Core Functions vEPC, HSS/HLS and all access functions at the mobile network, support functions grafana, graphite, influx, and other monitoring automating tools. Huawei and RedHat,

· In use for all production use cases. Have completely removed proprietary software from infrastructure.

· Using it to virtualize network fincriona

· Production environment, virtual functions, Big Data, analytics platform.

· Internal private cloud, CI and test infrastructure, OpenStack vendor

· NFV deployment

· Operation and maintenance

· For next generation core network

· Telco network cloud based on open stack

· for (some of) our virtualised products

· vEPC

· As a test bed for developers

All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder/s. Copyright Decisive Media Limited. All rights reserved.

Documents

All brands and products are the trademarks of their ...€¦ · According to Telcos, OpenStack and ONAP are two of the Open Source projects which will be most relevant for 5G SLOW!