Amazon EKS Anywhere Certifies on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors to Ramp vRAN
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working with Intel to boost Telco adoption of cloud-native network solutions. The two companies are developing on a certification and go-to-market initiative to allow communication service providers and network operators to take advantage of cloud-native solutions for their next-generation networks.
Much of the existing appliance-based network infrastructure was not designed to take advantage of cloud economics and edge computing. A transition is required for service providers to reap the benefits of cloud native designs and improve overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Given that most service providers have made significant investments in on-prem infrastructure that need to be capitalized, they want to take advantage of both their existing infrastructure investment and the cloud with hybrid deployments. This migration and separation of hardware and software allows for future software upgradability and scalability on top of commercial off-the-shelf servers based on Intel Xeon Scalable processing optimized for network workloads.
Working with Intel, AWS is planning to certify a specific set of use cases for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Anywhere on Intel® Xeon® scalable platforms. These platforms will be commercially available solutions from leading OEMs that are prominent in the industry today. By offering service providers access to optimized solutions for both greenfield and brownfield deployments, operators can take advantage of the cloud elasticity in their end-to-end network infrastructure, including the RAN (radio access network).
As part of this effort, each company will bring key expertise to develop reference architectures with the following deliverables that can be sourced by service providers:
- Certification of bare-metal deployments of Amazon EKS Anywhere on third-party, Intel-based compute platforms
- Ability to deploy customized OS with Amazon EKS Anywhere and third-party hardware (firmware, accelerator firmware, NICs, BIOS settings)
To accomplish this, AWS solution architects and specialists will work with Intel to validate Amazon EKS Anywhere with Intel’s FlexRAN® reference software. Other validated platform components include open source projects such as Multus, SR-IOV, DPDK, MacvLAN, and IPvLAN.
Intel has been at the forefront of network infrastructure virtualization and has built an ecosystem to deliver on the promise of a software-based infrastructure, including virtualized radio access networks. The next frontier is cloud-native designs that allow service providers to take advantage of AWS technologies that deliver the elasticity and scale sought by our customers. Intel’s vRAN technologies, combined with AWS and innovations from the OEM community, will give operators a compelling, best-of-breed approach to creating intelligent, scalable networks.
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