we get into the details of how 5G can be implemented in practice, we use CORD as our exemplar. For now, the important thing to understand is that 5G is being implemented as software running on commodity hardware, rather than embedded in the special-purpose proprietary hardware used in past generations. This has a significant impact on how we think about 5G (and how we describe 5G), which will increasingly become yet another software-based component in the cloud, as opposed to an isolated and specialized technology attached to the periphery of the cloud.
Keep in mind that our use of CORD as an exemplar is not to imply that the edge cloud is limited to Central Offices. CORD is a good exemplar because it is designed to host both edge services and access technologies like 5G on a common platform, where the Telco Central Office is one possible location to deploy such a platform.
An important takeaway from this discussion is that to understand how 5G is being implemented, it is helpful to have a working understanding of how clouds are built. This includes the use of commodity hardware (both servers and white-box switches), horizontally scalable microservices (also referred to as cloud native), and Software-Defined Networks (SDN). It is also helpful to have an appreciation for how cloud software is developed, tested, deployed, and operated, including practices like DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
Further Reading
If you are unfamiliar with SDN, we recommend a companion book: Software-Defined Networks: A Systems Approach. March 2020.
If you are unfamiliar with DevOps—or more generally, with the operational issues cloud providers face—we recommend Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems.
One final note about terminology. Anyone that has been paying attention to the discussion surrounding 5G will have undoubtedly heard about Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which involves moving functionality that was once embedded in hardware appliances into VMs running on commodity servers. In our experience, NFV is a stepping stone towards the fully disaggregated and cloud native solution we describe in this book, and so we do not dwell on it. You can think of the NFV initiative as mostly consistent with the approach taken in this book, but making some different engineering choices when we get down into the specifics of the implementation (e.g., NFV is generally VM-based rather than microservice-based).
Although equating NFV with a different implementation choice is perfectly valid, there is another interpretation of events that better captures the essence of the transformation currently underway. When Telcos began the NFV initiative, they imagined incorporating cloud technologies into their networks, creating a so-called Telco Cloud. What is actually happening instead, is that the Telco’s access technology is being subsumed into the cloud, running as yet another cloud-hosted workload. It would be more accurate to refer to the resulting system now emerging as the Cloud-based Telco. One reading of this book is as a roadmap to such an outcome.
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