AWS announces new AWS Outposts rack and server offerings for telcos

Amazon Web Services has announced AWS Outposts racks for high throughput, network-intensive workloads and AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) workloads — new offerings that enable telecom service providers (telcos) to extend AWS infrastructure and services to deploy on-premises network functions requiring low latency, high throughput, and real-time performance. Both offerings will be generally available later this year to support hosting 5G Core user plane function (UPF), RAN centralized unit (CU), and RAN distributed unit (DU) workloads.

AWS Outposts racks for high throughput, network-intensive workloads and AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud RAN workloads help telcos modernize legacy networks and accelerate the deployment of virtualized cloud-based networks. The offerings extend the seamless and secure cloud infrastructure and services from AWS Regions and large metro areas to customers’ on-premises data centers and edge locations. This continuum of AWS infrastructure and services—include AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Outposts—addresses telcos’ needs for low-latency, migration and modernization, data residency, and local data processing use cases.

“With the new AWS Outposts offerings, the AWS Cloud Continuum can now extend to the furthest edge of the 5G network, allowing Telcos to run their entire 5G network including 5G Core and 5G RAN on AWS cloud services. The AWS Outposts rack offering features a new architecture that allows cost efficient capacity scaling to meet the growing throughput demands on the most densely populated 5G networks globally. The AWS Outposts server offering supports both Open and Virtual RAN architectures with complete feature and performance parity with appliance-based 5G RAN. These offerings will empower Telcos to build a future-proof cloud infrastructure to support 5G and beyond. The breakthrough innovations will enable superior end-customer experiences, faster network deployment, better price performance, and reduced cost of ownership," says Dave Brown, Vice President of Compute and Networking, Amazon Web Services.

The AWS Outposts racks feature new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable-based (Sapphire Rapids) bare metal instances along with a high-performance bare metal network fabric, providing key benefits for telcos including -

·  Support for high throughput, network-intensive on-premises workloads: The AWS Outposts racks allow telcos to run high-throughput workloads with EC2 bare metal instances and a bare metal network fabric that can flexibly scale to meet increasing performance requirements.

·  Enhanced security and performance with AWS Nitro System: The new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances on the AWS Outposts racks are built on the same AWS Nitro System that powers modern Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Regions, extending the enhanced security and performance benefits of the Nitro System to distributed telco network locations.

·  Automated deployment, management, and scaling: The AWS Outposts racks support pre-validated Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) add-ons required to automate the deployment, management, and scaling of microservices-based 5G network functions.

·  Improved operational efficiency with regional AWS services:  With AWS Outposts, telcos can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the parent AWS Region. They can monitor their entire 5G network with a single set of AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and Amazon Managed Grafana. In addition, telcos can simplify 5G network operations with advanced analytics of network metrics data using AWS analytics and machine learning services such as Amazon Athena and Amazon SageMaker.

The new AWS Outposts servers are designed from the ground up for Cloud RAN workloads, meeting the most stringent form factor, environmental, synchronization, transport latency and throughput requirements to host critical RAN DU workloads at the furthest edge such as RAN cell towers.

AWS Outposts servers designed for Cloud RAN workloads enable telcos to leverage cloud infrastructure and services to deploy virtualized RAN solutions, accelerating 5G adoption and enabling new revenue-generating services. The servers are developed in collaboration with Nokia. AWS is also working with additional RAN vendors to integrate their accelerator cards as future options.