Closing the visibility gap in cloud-native networks to deliver a better 5G experience
The value of cloud-native networks lies in abstracting network and service topologies away from the underpinning infrastructure. However, this creates a visibility gap, making it difficult to correlate quality of experience issues with infrastructure issues. EXFO’s full-stack assurance closes this gap, delivering true bare-metal-to-customer-experience visibility.
Challenges
Cloud infrastructure abstraction
Cloud infrastructure abstraction breaks the capability of associating elements of the network and service topologies to specific hardware, creating a blind spot for operations teams. Loss of visibility makes it difficult to correlate customer quality-of-experience (QoE) issues with cloud infrastructure issues.
Operations silos
Network and service operations teams manage quality of service (QoS) and QoE issues in the virtualized cloud-native network. IT and cloud operations teams manage the cloud infrastructure. They traditionally use different tools and measure different metrics, making it challenging to address cross-domain issues.
Dynamic cloud-native infrastructure
Dynamic network and service topologies are well understood as challenges to service assurance. However, cloud-native infrastructure is also highly dynamic, further complicating root cause analysis. Hardware upgrades, software/firmware upgrades, and thousands of ‘tuning parameters’ can lead to subtle yet impactful QoS issues.
Data tsunami
5G cloud-native networks generate a lot of performance data—north of 40 Petabytes per hour. Combine this with infrastructure observability data and you have a data tsunami. Moving, storing, processing and extracting actionable insight from this data will be extremely cost prohibitive without a significant rethink of assurance in cloud networks.
Mobile edge assurance
Large data centers have an unlimited supply of CPUs, GPUs, storage and power to run highly scalable workloads. Mobile edge compute (MEC) sites don’t; these resources need to be managed carefully to ensure workload performance and fairness for multi-tenant locations. Without visibility of workload performance and power consumption, QoE could suffer.
Change drivers
End-user experience is no longer determined by coverage and network performance as "compute and container" infrastructure becomes a new domain to manage, monitor and assure. As complexity escalates with network virtualization, operators must keep up with dynamic onboarding, deployment, and orchestration of cloud-native apps. They must locate performance issues across layers to isolate origin.
Compute infrastructure is the new fault domain and must be actively managed, monitored and assured accordingly.
Impacts
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Measuring CPU utilization for 5G polling workloads
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5G infrastructure availability/resiliency
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5G resource utilization and exhaustion
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5G networking congestion
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Automated power saving
Use cases
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Invisible traffic
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Difficult to detect and diagnose
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Increased MTTR
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Abstraction
End-user experience is no longer determined by coverage and network performance as “compute and container” infrastructure becomes a new domain to manage, monitor and assure. As complexity escalates with network virtualization, operators must keep up with dynamic onboarding, deployment, and orchestration of cloud-native apps. They must locate performance issues across layers to isolate origin.
Compute infrastructure is the new fault domain and must be actively managed, monitored and assured accordingly.
Benefits
EXFO has been collaborating with Intel to add the Intel® Platform Telemetry Insights data feed to our EXFO Adaptive Service Assurance platform, providing full insight from CPU performance to customer experience.
Cross-domain visibility
EXFO leverages Intel® Platform Telemetry Insights to achieve service-to-infrastructure cross-domain linkage, giving operators an integrated view of services and underlying infrastructure performance. Correlated visibility across network, service and cloud infrastructure layers, combines with automated diagnostics to pinpoint the origin of degradations.
Faster fault resolution
Streaming analytics quickly identify the root cause of a customer-impacting degradation. It can identify whether a saturated CPU, underperforming network card or network function glitch is causing call drops, high latency or bad video quality. This shortens time to detect, diagnose and resolve degradations by 80% through 5G cloud-native observability.
Proactive assurance
5G network automation can now easily extend across the distributed compute environments it depends on. This unlocks insight into the new 5G cloud infrastructure, enabling real-time, preemptive actions to maintain superior user experience. Optimize 5G performance by revealing the interactions between cloud and network infrastructure.
Next steps
EXFO & Intel collaborate on groundbreaking full-stack assurance solution
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