Are cloud providers’ edge deals with operators symbiotic or parasitic? Both Amazon (Wavelength) and Microsoft (Stack) have tailored edge offerings that essentially extend a tendril of their cloud into a telco data center. The cloud providers view this as a symbiotic relationship, meaning it’s an ecosystemic partnership that benefits both parties. Some telcos think it’s parasitic, which I’m sure you don’t need me to define. Which it is may be hard to determine, now or even in the future, for a number of reasons.
One good reason for uncertainty is that edge computing is often linked to 5G hosting, and in particular to Open RAN and a broader-and-still-undefined “open 5G”. Operators have accepted that they might well have no choice than to host edge-5G components because they might not have real estate in all areas, but opponents have pointed out that Wavelength/Stack requires telco real estate in any event. That raises the first question: Would telcos perhaps use cloud-provider edge services hosted on another telco’s real estate?
The operators I’ve talked with say “No!” decisively. They insist their deals with public cloud providers would foreclose that, which means either that the “out-of-region” 5G hosting driver is a non-starter, or that cloud providers themselves might deploy hosting compatible with Wavelength/Stack (as appropriate) to be shared.
The second reason for edge symbiosis uncertainty is that edge applications are a big question mark. The big 5G network equipment vendors are promoting using their own tools to host 5G edge, and when you get beyond 5G hosting as an application, you enter the realm of speculation. Light Reading did an article on the topic, and say that without edge computing, network “latency is anything between 50 and 200 milliseconds, levels that would trigger seasickness in users of virtual reality headsets and turn streets of autonomous vehicles into a demolition derby.” If we take these two example applications, the first begs the question of what virtual reality headset applications are, and the second ignores the fact that collision avoidance in self-drive is almost certainly not going to be hosted off the vehicles themselves.
This question of applications for the edge is one I’ve noted before, and it’s an example of a broader issue I’ve also noted, which is to presume that because you can think of something to do with a technology, that “something” will justify it. I’ve been working on the modeling of the opportunity for augmented reality or virtual reality in relation to IoT, and it’s been exceptionally difficult to get the factors right.
A sifi writer, Robert Heinlein, did a 1950s book called “The Door into Summer”. It postulated a 1970 world where a robotic vacuum cleaner inventor cold-sleeps himself into the year 2000, where he finds all manner of robotic stuff, invented by him. That happens because he’s able to then time-travel back to 1970 to take what he found in 2000 and patent it. OK, the theory has a lot of outlandish elements, but my point in citing it is that the advanced robotics that were postulated for 2000 (or even the basic stuff for 1970) were not anything close to being realized at those dates. Imagination (and PR) has no inertia or boundaries. So it may be with edge applications; they make a nice story today, but there’s a lot of moving parts in them that are not yet moving.
This generates our second question: Is there a mission for edge computing that operators could cite to justify deployment? 5G hosting alone isn’t it; edge computing is a general-purpose commitment. The answer to this, IMHO, is that there is no clear near-term mission. Thus, operators who made a major financial commitment to “the edge” would be reckless in the eyes of their CFOs and Wall Street. You don’t commit depreciable assets to a future mission; you wait till the mission is credible in the near term.
Put in this context, the decision by operators to cloudsource its 5G hosting might seem to make more sense. My reason for the “might” is that point about real estate I made earlier. Operators probably don’t have edge hosting resources on which to run cloud-provider symbiotes/parasites. If they have to acquire them, then they’ve taken the big depreciable-asset-risk step. How do we reconcile this with the no-current-justification point? There are ## possibilities. Obviously one possibility is that both operators and cloud providers have drunk too much bath water, but let’s set that aside and assume rational business planning on both sides. What then?
One possibility is that operators aren’t worried about stranding computing assets because they believe 5G will justify them. Whether 5G is open or proprietary, it’s based on the presumption of hosted functions of some sort. They have to run somewhere, and most operators agree that that “somewhere” is likely at least within a metro and perhaps (particularly for large metro areas) even in each central office. So, you stick some edge data centers where you want to host 5G. Your problem then is that you don’t know anything about clouds and hosting, so the cloud provider deal is a way to get those edge data centers functioning correctly. As time passes and your own skills grow, you can kick out the symbiotes if they turn out to be parasites.
Another possibility is that cloud providers know that operators, presented with a “portable cloud” strategy that they have to invest in hosting, will elect to commit to a cloud provider’s own edge. Get some Wavelength/Stack contracts in place, maybe let the operators fund a couple data centers, and they’ll come to their senses and ask you to deploy your data centers in their areas. Maybe they even rent/sell you real estate.
A third possibility is that both cloud providers and operators recognize that low-latency applications of any sort will have to avoid ever getting onto the Internet. The edge, then, must be a piece of operator’s infrastructure, and 5G transport has to ride on internal operator capacity. In short, 5G is a total end-to-end ecosystem, and operators are simply looking to gain the skills needed to host the functional and application pieces. They’re building a “limited public cloud.”
Which of these three might be true is beyond my skill to predict, and in any event, I suspect that every operator would have its own probability set to define the most likely scenario they’d adopt. Instead, I want to look at the implications of the most interesting of the choices, the last. It’s the one I’d like to think will win, but I can’t present a modeling case to support it yet.
The essence of the third possibility is that carrier cloud and public cloud would be interdependent more than competitive, a true longer-term symbiosis. The operators wouldn’t be expecting to compete with public cloud providers for today’s applications, and the public cloud providers would be accepting that a carrier cloud deployment would happen. Linking the two, perhaps in some cases in a single relationship and others in a multi-cloud relationship, would be the Wavelength/Stack model. It would jump-start carrier cloud, and provide an extended cloud that likely both cloud providers and operators could “sell” depending on the balance of edge/deep-hosting in the applications.
This opens some interesting possibilities, I think. It would likely promote faster and broader use of edge computing, particularly if I’m correct and the public cloud providers and operators could cooperate in developing and selling edge services. It would raise the pace of carrier cloud data center adoption, it would promote enhanced applications…a lot of good stuff. The question is whether the stars within both the public cloud providers and network operators will align. We have tools so far, but they’re not mature enough to answer that opening question; symbiote or parasite?
That question will probably have to be answered by vendors and not operators. Operator initiatives in open networking have been mired in the usual standards-group quicksand and they simply cannot advance the technology fast enough to influence the market. Remember that both cloud providers and operators looking to deploy their own 5G hosting will need something to host. We have solutions today, but are they optimized for performance in the cloud, optimized for their use of white-box switching (including specialty boxes for data-plane handling)? I don’t think so, and so the direction that the operator/hyperscaler partnership will take is likely to be determined by the players who offer the right technology, and who they offer it to.