Red Hat Extends OpenShift Reach Deeper into Telecommunications Networks
Red Hat today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event revealed that via a series of alliances it has extended the reach of the Red Hat OpenShift platform deeper into the realm of telecommunications.
KDDI, Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten Symphony, StarHub, Orange, Fujitsu, Safaricom, Turkcell and T-Mobile are all now using the Red Hat OpenShift to build and deploy cloud-native applications.
Fran Heeran, vice president and head of the global telecommunications business unit for Red Hat, said in some instances those applications are built by either a provider, a third-party provider of networking and security services, or an end customer that is deploying software, for example at the network edge.
In some cases, those applications are being built from the ground up while in others they are legacy applications that are being encapsulated in containers as part of an effort to streamline the management of the software development lifecycle, using a common architecture that ultimately reduces costs, he added.
Additionally, telecommunications providers are also using Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for deploying Open Radio Access Network (OpenRAN) frameworks that promote interoperability across 5G wireless networks.
The overall goal is to lower the cost of building and deploying modern applications across distributed computing environments that enable more software to be accessed at the point where data is increasingly created, processed and analyzed.
Most of those applications are now being built using containers that are deployed on some type of a Kubernetes cluster. There may even come a day soon when there are more Kubernetes clusters deployed at the network edge than there are in the cloud.
The pace at which telecommunications providers are making that transition will naturally vary, however, the pace at which these service providers are building and deploying applications is accelerating, especially in the artificial intelligence (AI) era. Many of these applications need to run in near real time at the network edge to ensure high levels of interactivity.
Less clear is the degree to which migrating to cloud-native architectures is impacting the ability of telecommunications service providers to compete. However, as cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to extend their reach to the network edge, it’s clear competition is intensifying as the line between telecommunications and cloud services continues to narrow.
The challenge telecommunications providers have is that many of them are much more dependent on legacy technologies that need to be modernized across highly distributed computing environments. Few of them indeed can simply afford to rip and replace their existing infrastructure.
Ultimately, however, there will come a day when the number of cloud-native applications does exceed the number of legacy monolithic legacy applications that have been deployed in production environments, especially with the rise of AI coding tools that make it simpler to build new applications.
The challenge, as always, will be finding the best way to deploy, secure, update and manage a portfolio of software that will soon be exponentially larger than anyone might have imagined a few short years ago.
