Telecom business moves towards cloud computing in three steps

The main problems of current business system are: vertical construction of main business platform, continuous investment, small amount of existing SP business, low utilization of equipment, inability to share, long tail business development and operation cost is high, can not form an effective contribution; base business construction, content can not be shared, user information can not be shared. If the traditional business network architecture, these problems can not be fundamentally resolved, and the rise of cloud computing technology has brought us a glimmer of light.

Pooling and virtualization of telecommunications services

Virtualization technology has experienced more than more than 10 years of development, technology has been more mature. and cloud management technology after several years of rapid development, technology has been more perfect. Therefore, in the first phase of cloud of current network service, Cloud management and virtualization technology can be used to centralize the physical server to form pool resource pool (including computing resource pool, storage resource pool and network resource pool) to realize the virtualization of the underlying resources. Virtualization will be a host virtual into more than one virtual host, so as to improve server utilization. Cloud management technology provides unified management of virtual machines and physical entities, storage devices, network devices, and upper application deployments.

In the composition form of the resource pool, it must be the mixed form of the entity machine and the virtual machine, the entity machine undertakes the fixed Service quantity processing, the virtual machine is mainly responsible for the processing of the flexible business volume, taking into account the robustness and flexibility of the system.

At this stage, the original business can be migrated directly to the cloud computing resource pool. The business itself does not need to be changed, but the underlying physical facility is transformed from exclusive to shared mode. The supply and release of resources, the cloud management platform according to the business request unified scheduling, fast completion. Obviously, the benefit of this approach is to achieve the sharing of resources, improve the utilization of resources, reduce costs, the supply efficiency of resources has also increased significantly.

Business pooling and terminal Cloud is the first step, most can produce benefits, can be used first in the hall, call center for rent. From the current situation, the technology involved in this phase has been generally mature, basically have the ability to support the transformation of the underlying resources. At present, the domestic three operators have started the resource pool and terminal cloud-related work, and has landed in a number of major provinces resource pool and business hall, call center Terminal Cloud Project.

The Platform of Telecommunication service

The first step in the cloud of telecommunication services solves the problem of sharing the underlying resources, but it does not solve the problems of application sharing, isolation, application of rapid low-cost development and deployment, and low cost promotion. The application is still exclusive of the original middleware, database, the application of the development is still the original way, development, deployment, promotion of high cost.

In the second step, it is recommended that telecom operators introduce cloud computing PAAs platform, so that the application developers only care about the application itself, do not need to consider the purchase of development tools, operating systems, databases, servers, storage, or how to connect with SMS, MMS, WAP, location and other telecommunications business system docking problems, The PAAs platform encapsulates these features, including the business execution environment, the telecommunications/Internet IT capabilities API (Applicationprogramminginterface, the Application programming Interface), and the SDK (Softwaredevelopmentkit, Software development package, only need developers to have a good application of creativity can greatly reduce the application of the development threshold.

Application online, the PAAs platform to provide the application of the promotion and payment functions, that is, the application of marketing also do not need the developer too much care, by the PAAs platform based on user behavior analysis, targeted promotion.

The introduction of PAAs platform will greatly improve the efficiency of application innovation, development and marketing. The PAAs platform realizes the application platform and realizes the sharing and aggregation at the application level.

With the introduction of the PAAs platform, the original stand-alone application can invoke the external public service capabilities of the PAAs platform, such as SMS, MMS, location, advertising, payment and other public service capabilities. The application based on PAAs platform does not need the system of operating system, database, middleware and so on, which can be implemented by the PAAs platform in the business execution environment, which is provided with the automation deployment of the application, load balancing, the application of multi-tenant capability support, the application of flexible scalability and other functions.

From the integration of basic resources to the integration of the upper application is the inevitable choice of operators. Taking cloud pioneer Amazon as an example, its EC2 and S3 infrastructure rental services have fallen 40–50% in the past three years, and Amazon is now extending its application to the top tier, offering High-value PAAs platform services, E-commerce platform services.

For example, Vodafone, the European operator, has launched a PAAs platform based VBP service (vodafonebusinessplace) for the Spanish enterprise market, That is, the open development Platform for enterprises and the APPSTORE.VODAFONEVBP business model is Vodafone to provide PAAs platform, API/SDK to a large number of SP developers to use, the development of applications by the VODAFONEVBP marketing, revenue to use a divided approach At present, more than 100 SPS have been developed, and more than 500 applications and services for small and medium-sized enterprises have been exploited, and the number of enterprise users has grown from hundreds of thousands of to millions of, which has made the market success.

Business platform to achieve a small and long tail application platform integration, further enhance the application development and on-line efficiency, To build the IDC operating system and the Enterprise App Store. At present, this stage is also the focus of the operators, combined with PAAs platform technology, in a limited scope of the business to try, and then gradually expand its application scenarios, will be a period of time the main theme of cloud business. China Mobile and China Telecom have already used PAAs platforms in major provinces to integrate a large number of niche and long tail business platforms.

Applied distributed and Cluster management

The above two steps have completed the sharing of the bottom resource pool and the upper level application, solved the problem that the resources cannot be shared, the application can not be low cost, the fast development on-line and the promotion. The third step to solve the problem is how to support the problem of mass application and information processing, which requires the introduction of distributed and cluster management capabilities.

In the resource pool to introduce distributed database, distributed file system, parallel computing and cluster management capabilities, at this time the application needs to support distributed deployment, the upper level of application of the database from the lower distributed database, data support unlimited capacity expansion. The original application based on PAAs platform does not need to be reformed at this stage, but it needs PAAs platform to fit the distributed database, distributed file system, parallel computing and cluster management.

Under the third step of the network architecture, all applications are based on distributed and cluster management, which supports the unlimited expansion of applications and the optimal processing costs of massive amounts of information. In this framework, the telecommunications business will be fully integrated with the Internet business, and access to Google and other internet and cloud computing giants close to the cost and efficiency.

Telecom business to Cloud computing, the ultimate goal is to achieve the full integration of telecommunications business and Internet services, and to deal with a large amount of applications and information industry the best efficiency and cost, to achieve the operator from the telecom operation to the comprehensive information operation of the overall transformation. In the three stages of the telecom business to cloud computing, the first two phases are mature, the operators can do it first, and the third stage is not mature enough for the core technology of distributed database and cluster, it still needs a period of maturity.

(Responsible editor: Liu Fen)