Cloud Computing in Telecom Workshop Presentation Abstracts

   
1. Cloud Computing in Telecom


Brian Moore  
Fellow of the Technical Staff, Motorola

Description:

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology will impact future computing service implementa-tions. However, it is not clear how cloud computing can be used to implement telecom services.

Currently telecom services are implemented on carrier grade platforms within private networks. Carrier grade platforms provide functionality that is not typically associated with Cloud Computing. This talk will examine some of the key carrier grade platform functionality for Tel-ecom and examine the potential Cloud Computing gaps.


2. Requirements on telecom grade cloud computing infrastructures

Andras Vajda 
Strategic Software Researcher, Ericsson

Description:

Cloud computing is emerging as the next step in the process of rationalization and commoditization of computing. At the same time, we are witnessing the convergence of traditional IT solutions and telecommunications into an ever more integrated infrastructure.

In this presentation we evaluate how cloud computing infrastructures can meet the require-ments of quality of service, availability and reliability specific to telecommunication infrastruc-tures. We start from our experiences porting several telecom services (server nodes, content delivery networks, media transcoding etc) to cloud computing environments, highlighting the benefits as well as the shortcomings of traditional, IT-oriented cloud computing infrastructures.

Based on these real world experiences, we outline the principles that have to underpin, in our opinion, any cloud computing environment targeting telecom grade applications. We will ad-dress issues related to QoS of transport networks, locality, availability, data management, se-curity as well as operation and management.

Finally, starting from these principles, we elaborate on the concrete requirements telecom grade cloud computing environments shall fulfill and will present a potential architecture of such a computing platform.

 

3. Carrier grade cloud base platform for telecomm application hosting - Food for Thought

Alex Vul 
Chief Architect, Cloud & Virtualization Management Solutions, BMC Software 

Description:

Hosting of carrier grade telecomm applications in the cloud requires a highly available, highly redundant, highly secure cloud base platform that enables hosting of each application to the right service levels and at the right cost. This session examines various cloud computing technologies available today and proposes a reference cloud base platform integration architecture based on these technologies...

Outline:
  • Evolution of cloud computing
  • Cloud computing technology landscape
  • Virtualization in the cloud
  • Data mobility and security
  • Carrier grade cloud base platform organization
  • Platform components
  • High level platform architecture
  • Realization Example - using BMC dynamic service management technologies
  • Q and A

4. From Components to Cloud Services

Tentative Speaker: Bernd Kaponig, ORACLE / Sun

Description:

Many communications service providers are looking at becoming public cloud service provid-ers, usually for infrastructure and platform services. And there are technology providers that have components for building such cloud infrastructures, like middleware, virtualization, or management tools as well as network elements and hardware. Despite all the cloud-washed marketing, in practice there is still quite a significant gap between a component and a public service based on a component. There is a big difference, for example, between just a bunch of storage devices and a public block storage service, or between just message queueing middleware and a public queueing service, or between just service enablers and service execution environments and a public SDP as a service. In this presentation we will look at what is required to bridge this gap and at some of the experiences that we gained building this bridge in actual projects.

Outline:
  • It all starts with the business use cases: What cloud services are to be provided/sold at all?
  • The face of a cloud: APIs as the contract with cloud consumers, and as the technical repre-sentation of the business use cases
  • The two main aspects of a cloud API: the exposed functionality and the conceptual representation of the cloud infrastructure
  • Example: How a conceptual IaaS model could look like
  • Mapping exposed concepts to available cloud resources
  • Implementation of cloud API functionality with an SOA approach
  • Example: Automatic deployment of an application assembly consisting of multiple compo-nents
  • Conclusions

5. The Emergence of the Network Cloud

Kevin Bross
Intel

Description:

While the early excitement around cloud computing has mainly focused on moving enterprise computing applications to the cloud, the emergence of network clouds could significantly alter how network services are offered. Innovative approaches to network design are deconstructing traditional service/equipment segmentation and reducing OpEx costs by moving location-independent tasks away from the edge and centralizing some equipment in data centers or larger central offices. This presentation explores opportunities to deliver new content-aware services and security services while leveraging some of the cost and performance advantages often commonly present in data centers. This shift may drive a need for agility and adaptability to deliver vendor differentiation as TEMs and equipment providers deploy solutions built on common building blocks, and this presentation showcases some examples for identifying and capitalizing on such transitions.

 

6. How is virtualization useful in cloud computing, and are there any gaps to the virtualization solutions?

Tentative Speaker: Peter Collins

Sr Manager Systems Engineering, Citrix

Description:

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr chronicles the evolution of the production of electric power from individuals producing their own to the delivery by large organizations. We are going through a similar paradigm shift with client computing today. Could computing and virtualiza-tion have opened up opportunities for organizations to offer a Virtual Desktop environment to companies and individuals? Many large System Integrators have started to offer dynamic vir-tual desktop environments to organizations. Who is in a better position than the Telecom pro-viders to offer end users an easier alternative? The current trend of SaaS, outsourcing and Amazon EC2 cloud demonstrates a real desire by organizations to find a better way to man-age their computing environments.

Come hear how the foundations are there for you to offer Virtual Desktop environment to or-ganizations and end-user alike. Someone is going to capitalize on these opportunities why shouldn’t it be your organization? Desktop computing is going through a revaluation and now is the time to start planning for it.


7. Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Tentative Speaker: Robin Smith
ORACLE / Sun

Description:

By abstracting IT resources away from their consumers, virtualization makes cloud computing more manageable and economic. Virtualization enables software to run without regard to the physical hardware and is a key enabler for rapid deployment, resource sharing, easy capacity adjustment and efficient hardware utilization. Virtualization also allows the packaging of port-able appliances that allow for easy deployment. Learn how virtualization capabilities provide unprecedented performance and manageability of IT resources while also providing seamless integration with technology, applications and data center best practices and how this could be leveraged by the Telco Clouds.

Key Focus Areas:

Virtualization and Virtualization Management VM Template Builder Appliances and Assemblies

 

8. Cloud Computing Security

Makan Pourzandi 
Ericsson

Description:

According to a recent industry research, 72% of organizations are "extremely concerned" or "very concerned" about security in the cloud environment (2010 research firm TheInfoPro). We propose to discuss the security related issues in Cloud computing and their impact when de-ploying a Telecom application in the cloud. We first present a high level overview of security and CC before delving into more specific security needs when deploying Telecom servers in cloud environment.

The presentation outline is the following:

  • Cloud Security Service landscape
    • CC security perception and overview
    • CC security standards
    • Existing approaches to CC security (for example Amazon)
  • Cloud Computing Security Overview
    • Who manages the cloud? And How?
    • Who owns it? 
    • Where is it located? 
    • Who has access to it? 
    • How is it accessed?
  • Specific security needs for a carrier grade server running in
    • IaaS 
    • PaaS 
    • SaaS 
  • Conclusions 

 

9. Using "Secure by Design" Principles to Secure the Cloud 

Rao Vasireddy
Alcatel-Lucent

Description:

There is a perception associated with cloud computing that security for cloud environment is a totally different beast when compared to the traditional Telco environment security. What if securing the cloud could be done in much the same way that traditional Telco environments are secured? The complex issues of security in a cloud environment need to be simplified with an objective to establish a security baseline by leveraging current practices / standards and well known security attributes as metrics. Examples of key security attributes include ac-cess control, authentication/authorization, data confidentiality, privacy, data integrity, data confidentiality and non-repudiation. These metrics can then be analyzed to determine where any shortcomings, or security gaps exist and track the gaps.

“Secure by Design” process has been used successfully in the development and maintenance of Telco equipment and solutions. This presentation is focused on how such a process could be used and adapted as a means of evaluating the security in a cloud environment.
 

 

10. From virtualization to cloud federation

Benny Schnaider
Vice President of Business Development, Red Hat

Description:

The key enabling technologies for Cloud Computing is virtualization. However, more technolo-gies are required to deliver the promise of ubiquitous Cloud Computing. Open Source has been the foundation for most cloud computing solutions and is likely to remain this way as we move from single virtualized server through private and public cloud into federation of clouds from different vendors.

 

11. PaaS for Next Generation Service Provider Including Introduction to the Intercloud

David Bernstein 
VP and Special CTO for the Software Division of Huawei R&D, North America, Huawei

Description:

More and More and more Service Providers are researching how to add new subscriber facing services to their network. In many cases these new services utilize communications, internet connectivity, entertainment and content, storage, and computational resources. Service Pro-viders are also realizing the power of developer communities and “App Stores” which allow for more rapid innovation of these services. Some Service Providers have realized that a Cloud Computing platform might be the perfect infrastructure for these services, as Cloud Computing supposedly provides the programmability, ease of deployment, and elasticity to scale services across wide geographic domains and high subscriber counts. We describe a distributed, self-scaling application container, advanced distributed storage and Map-Reduce systems, and a unique, self aware analytics system which is imperative for the Service Provider’s visibility and agility in delivering new services. On the Communications side, we describe Cloud-PaaS-native approaches to identity, enum, call control, media servers, location, and more. We describe how retaining the design notion of an SDP has enabled us agility on the southbound side to adapters and network resources, and on the northbound side to offer standard API sets such as GSMA OneAPI, OMA PXPROF, PSA, ParlayREST and NGSI, and to extend these to mobile widget toolkits such as OMTP / BONDI, JIL, W3C, and Android.

Service providers also do not want the Cloud Computing based services they develop and deploy, to be an isolated island for which they must build out everything. The Service provid-ers want to offer geographic diversity of their clouds, extreme scalability and capacity of their clouds, including computing, storage, and network footprint as they do with Mobile Roaming, or with Inter-Carrier MPLS VPN, We describe our work in creating such a Cloud Computing system for the Service providers. Our system encompasses an innovative core and set of fa-cilities in the PaaS layer; we also share our work in the standards and interoperability area of Cloud Computing which enables interworking and federation of Cloud Computing platforms, called the “Intercloud”. Technologies are emerging in this area are brand new and place new requirements on naming systems and trust infrastructures, as well as new interchange proto-cols. Essentially, the Internet infrastructure which gave us DNS, URLs, Certificates, Ex-changes and Peering, all need additional thinking as to handling the rich facilities and diversi-ties of Cloud Computing.

At the end of this session, Service Providers will get a deep understanding of the upper layers of software platform and interoperability technology which is the current state of the art in Cloud Based Platforms.

 

12. Architectural considerations for cooperation of network and IT services.

Chris Wardale
Standards Policy Manager
NEC Europe Ltd  

Description:

Operators can offer advantageous SLAs for Cloud Services on their own data networks that connect to their cloud architecture data centers. However this cooperation of network and IT services must have agile management that takes account of the applications being handled yet control the actual data packet flows. Overload must be anticipated and traffic rerouted on demand. By externalizing the control from the switches it is possible to control reconfiguration with network wide intelligence or provide a degree of network service creation on demand. The OpenFlow architecture is based on separating control and data plane as a fundamental architectural piece, in order to achieve higher flexibility on the switch control.

 

13. Carrier Grade in Scale-Out Network Datacenters

Jim Baker
HP

Description:

The talk will focus on the role of carrier grade platforms in single or multi-tenancy scale-out datacenters. An overview of scale-out datacenters and cloud usage models is given as it is essential to establishing context for this issue.

  1. Overview of the Next Generation converged, virtualized-scale out enterprise da-ta centers using industry standard bladed infrastructure platforms
  2. Multi-tenancy scale out Datacenters and the XaaS Cloud usage models
  3. Services providers as users or providers of cloud multi-tenancy scale-out Data-centers
  4. Views on the network evolution, Network Datacenters and Carrier Grade re-quirements
  5. CG as a feature of a volume industry standard blade platform based Next Gen-eration single or multi-tenancy scale-out Datacenters
  6. Thoughts on the longer term evolution of CG requirements in the context of network evolution and cloud scale-out Datacenters