Microsoft is arguably the leader in enterprise cloud computing, given that a big chunk of Amazon’s cloud business comes from startups and social-network players. Now, Microsoft wants to be the leader in carrier cloud too, or so it seems. There’s no question that Microsoft has the credentials for carrier cloud, technology-wise, and they also seem to understand some of the thorny market issues. The questions are, first, whether that’s enough to give Microsoft a real edge, and second, whether other cloud players will work harder to counter the move.
Microsoft’s initiatives have coalesced in its private multi-access edge (MEC) offering, and the nomenclature is interesting in itself. Rather than pushing a specific 5G or carrier cloud strategy, they’re pushing edge computing software tools as a general offering, and then enriching it with tools that support, for example, the 5G hosting mission. There’s also a strong dose of “exploit on-premises equipment”, supplementing the cloud, a promise of white-box support, and a touch of carrier cloud in their material. All of this reflects their understanding of the basic truth that 5G is the likely driver of edge computing deployments, but it’s not the exclusive mission.
Edge computing is pretty much what the name suggests, computing that’s close to the point of activity, rather than tucked away in a distant data center. The business challenge of edge computing is the fact that to be “close” to the edge, there’d have to be a lot of hosting points, which means a lot of cost. A cloud provider like Microsoft would have to think twice about making a massive edge investment in the hope that something would come along to justify it. The technical challenge is that if edge facilities aren’t part of the public cloud, then what tools are available to build edge applications, and how would they relate to traditional public cloud application resources?
The reason why there’s so much attention paid to 5G and edge computing in combination, is that 5G hosting represents a large and logical application for the edge. It could be the most significant driver of edge hosting, and whatever tools and techniques are selected to support it would be available to leverage by other applications that benefit from low latency. Thus, if a public cloud provider can support edge computing and 5G with a nice tool set, allow users to deploy their own edge hosting based on that tool set, and expand their own edge hosting resources as opportunities allow, they’d be in a great position. That’s Microsoft’s goal in a nutshell.
One thing that makes Microsoft’s private MEC a technical winner is the company’s previous acquisition of Affirmed and Metaswitch, and (in my view), the latter in particular. Metaswitch has been a player in cloud-hosted cellular infrastructure for over a decade, so they’ve had the most experience of any vendor I know in virtualizing and optimizing 4G and 5G functionality for deployment in the cloud. Microsoft is offering both the Affirmed and Metaswitch software as core mobile solutions packages in their private MEC framework.
Because the software is also available separately, and because the whole Microsoft offering can be deployed onto premises equipment (which also means “onto operator servers”), Microsoft isn’t presenting mobile operators with a choice of adopting their stuff and getting locked into public cloud, or rejecting it and having to deploy their own infrastructure or using IaaS or container hosting without special latency support. While there are operators who are looking at hosting 5G functions in the public cloud, there’s a lot of 5G that’s going to be hosted on white boxes, and operators may deploy their own data centers in at least major metro areas. Microsoft’s approach supports that.
Mobile operators, particularly the larger ones, are always antsy about relying on a third party for hosting services, but they get even more skittish when they believe their stuff is swirling around in a vast public cloud pool along with a bunch of other customers’ applications. Operators have always believed their requirements for function hosting are distinct, which is one reason they’re focused on things like NFV rather than on the equivalent cloud management and orchestration tools. Microsoft even reflects that bias, offering the Azure Network Function Manager to deploy features (including mobile and SD-WAN) to compatible edge elements. The name of the offering should appeal to the NFV folks.
Interestingly, Microsoft doesn’t highlight NFV explicitly in their material, which you’ll see of you follow the reference link earlier in this blog. It seems that what Microsoft is intending is to create a network function store, where anyone can obtain edge features for hosting in Azure’s Stack Edge Pro elements, and I think likely also in a private MEC or even the Azure cloud. That would mean Microsoft intends to bridge in two dimensions—supporting NFV or cloud-native, and supporting CPE (SD-WAN, SASE, uCPE, vCPE) or edge/cloud.
If that’s true, it raises the question of whether Microsoft might be the first player to offer a pathway to integrate white-box technology into edge hosting. The Microsoft material says “Specialized network functions, such as mobile packet core, can now be deployed on the Azure Stack Edge device with faster data path performance on the access point network and user plane network.” This can surely be interpreted as offering separation of control and data/user planes, with each assigned to specialized technology to enhance performance. Might it then address the TIP DDBR principles?
Another technical point raised by Microsoft’s private MEC is whether 5G’s virtualization is going to be enhanced by cloud-think. A poll on LinkedIn recently asked how the elements of Open RAN would be distributed, giving four specific options that were actually ways that virtual boxes might be organized. If Microsoft has its way, the elements of Open RAN might be distributed to anywhere that’s convenient, even to different places in different networks, cities, or even towers. Virtual elements are hosted in distributable abstractions, after all.
The net of this is that Microsoft has definitely taken steps to make 5G hosting and even NFV hosting into a cloud-centric process. This is Azure more than NFV; NFV is just an application. The store concept also promises to unload some of the challenges of onboarding, because store applications would be Microsoft-certified against Azure principles, including whatever specialized principles might apply where MEC or Stack Edge hosting is supported.
Light Reading is suggesting that “A big reason such hyperscale companies are investing in areas like edge computing and private wireless networking is because enterprises across a wide variety of sectors are increasingly looking to build their own private wireless networks.” I think that’s a bit of hopeful editorial/reportorial thinking. Enterprises are being pushed by vendors to consider private wireless, but I don’t think that the business case for that has really improved that much from years past. I think the real reason is that the public cloud providers know that operator deployment of 5G could be the first large-scale driver of edge computing, and they want edge to be a subset of cloud, not a competitor.
One obvious question is how the private MEC strategy would address the Rakuten criticism of telecom software. Metaswitch, at least, is a cloud-native implementation of 5G features, but it’s not a complete telecom software suite, since it lacks the OSS/BSS piece. However, if private MEC tools support cloud-native application models, then there’s at least a chance that the Microsoft offering, including the store, would promote cloud-native solutions to a broader set of telecom applications, including OSS/BSS. At the least, it might solidify a model for how to build telco software in cloud-native form, a model someone might pick up. Not necessarily, nor quickly, but maybe.
Every Microsoft cloud competitor is also seeing the 5G and MEC opportunity, but right now Microsoft may have not only a technical edge, but also a slight credibility edge. Operators I’ve talked with say that they would rank Microsoft on top by a hair, then Google, then Amazon, and then IBM. That includes both their view of the cloud provider’s 5G hosting and edge capability and their view of the provider as a trusted partner. If you look at credibility alone, Microsoft gains over the others, and if you look at trust alone, IBM gains over Amazon. Given all of that, it looks like Google is the competitor most likely to mess up Microsoft’s plan.
The benefit Google has, according to operators, is a combination of trust and an ad advantage in knowledge of cloud-native technology and network technology. However, my information predates the latest Microsoft MEC announcements. Microsoft is getting better, fast, and that will put a lot of pressure on a lot of competitive players.