Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're at Cloud Native Telco Day in London. I'm talking with Philippe Ensarguet. He is VP of software engineering at Orange. Philippe. Great to see you. Thanks very much for taking time to talk to us today. My great pleasure to be with you. So what does being cloud native mean to Orange?

Philippe Ensarguet, Orange (00:24):
Being cloud native? Telco at Orange, I would say is about thinking, building, designing, deploying and running. I would say scalable, flexible, resilient and secure infrastructure for our core to run services. So we are on telecom industry on a journey where we are piloting from the PNF world to the VNF world, to the CNF world, so to the cloud native network function world. So today I would say that this cloud native and the GitHubs operating model related is a hundred percent the foundation that we are pushing at Orange for what we are calling the horizontal model approach, where we want to get out the very vertical and proprietary model. So Cloudnative is absolutely at the earth of, I would say the telco cloud strategy at Orange. Now,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:15):
Orange has been involved for quite a while already with Project Silver. How important is Project Silver to Orange and other European telcos who are trying to achieve cloud

Philippe Ensarguet, Orange (01:28):
Native? Okay, so silver is very, very important to us and for I would say a lot of peers within the telecom industry. The reason is quite simple. We are using open source as a catalyst. We are sharing resources, we are working together on the comments to have time to make us to what make us very special. If I may say so, we are with the silver project that is a linex foundation hosted project. We are emit at building what we may call a cloud native telco industrial grid implementation. And the idea is to bring the engine to make the network function on the core, on the run at the edge, working by book, we can, I would say define silver as three things. So we got a framework where we define, I would say most of the requirements that we as a telco needs when we are building, I would say cloud native telco infrastructure.

(02:32):
The second one that for me is absolutely incremental is to have a reference implementation. I don't know any kind of open source project running without I would say a reference implementation. So we have a reference implementation and today we are supporting, I would say several open source Kubernetes flavor. We got the vanilla, we got the one from Red Hat, the one from Canonical, the one from SUSE with rancher for instance. And the last thing that is very, very important in silver is the validation center approach because you know that in telco industry we have the history of having network function qualified, certified, and validated on the specific, I would say infrastructure requirements. So within silver we have this validation center approach also that is extremely important. So to wrap up, we got a framework, a reference implementation and a validation center approach. And why is it so much important for orange and over peers?

(03:33):
Because at orange today, our orange telco cloud ca is a hundred percent build, I would say on the silver flavor. So it means that today what we are running in terms of CNF is running on the hard and secured, I would say silver orange implementation in our own infrastructure. If I want to share with you some figures, I can say that today I think that the silver deployment is about 10 plus percent of what we are running and it'll be more than 60 plus percent by 2000, 30 10%. You may say it's not so big. But we need to remind that, remember what I shared previously, P-N-F-V-N-F-C-N-F. So we are on a journey where we have this legacy modernization and today what is very cloud native is mainly around 5G and 5G core and packet core. So I think that we can expect a lot of progress in terms of deployment in the coming three to five years.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:34):
Well that's great to hear that this is something that's being taken into action, into networks, into production and isn't just an idea and something that's talked about. That's great to hear. Now obviously Orange and some of the other major operators are quite well advanced with their cloud native strategies, but is the telco sector in general where it needs to be in terms of cloud native adoption? I really

Philippe Ensarguet, Orange (05:01):
Love this question. I really believe that we are more on the marathon that Don on the sprint telecom industry is living in a sliding window back five to 10 years to what we may have in cloud or in digital. And it's okay, we just need to take into account that we have a lot of legacy that is moving. I observed a lot of progress in the last, I would say three to four years. And being cloud native for me is at least three things. It's about the runtime, the engine, it's about the deployment and the lifecycle management of the network function and the operating model. And in the fact two really I would say rely on true cloud native implemented network function. If I want to just be to give information about those free level, I would say that today I'm observing telecom peers very, very, very serious on implementing true cloudnative infrastructure.

(06:06):
We got very interesting progress on the lifecycle management deployment of the infra and network function. And here once again, we are using the Cloudnative operating model GitHubs. We are using GI UPS to manage the lifecycle and a lot of progress is currently made on this part. The last I would say miles that we need to really cover is the C in CNF doesn't stand for container but for cloudnative. So it means that today we really need from our partners, the network function vendors to have truly think design implemented network function that are able to really take the full power of the cloud native infrastructure we are currently building. So we are on the shift of a whole ecosystem. It's about the operator, the vendors, and the integrators. And we will be only successful if we succeed to manage, I would say the same right pace of the whole ecosystem.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:10):
And what would you say are the main barriers to the acceleration of cloud native adoption in the telco

Philippe Ensarguet, Orange (07:16):
Sector? For me there are three main barriers. If I may say the first one definitively is about the skills for a very simple reason because even if a network function remains from 3G PP definition, a network function, all that is surrounding has changed. It's a hundred percent software base, open, automated and all the cloud native, I would say lifecycle management and deployment. So it means that when you want to enter into the cloud native telco ecosystem, it have a serious impact on the skills of the teams. So you need really to upskill and to reskill, I would say software automation on container on the DevOps thing. It's really the first barrier. I may say. The second one is definitively for me the integrating challenges because today as operator we are using and having a lot of different partners and we have very, very different level of maturity in terms of cloud nativeness implementation of the network function. So honestly, it's not so easy from the integration standpoint. And I would say that the whole ecosystem is making progress has a whole in this area. The last one I would say could be on the operation side because when you may have, I would say P-N-F-V-N-F and CNF that are running inside, I would say the same telecom operator infrastructure, the challenges are very, very, very different. So it means that we certainly need to make progress into, I would say the holistic observability view of our operation. What

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:17):
Would you like to see happen next that can help further accelerate cloud native telco adoption?

Philippe Ensarguet, Orange (09:22):
So I think that what we could really help us in terms of acceleration for the cloud native telco is several things. I would say that first we certainly need, I would say better certification and validation that are more cloudnative and really relying on the true software. I would say posture, this one is important. The second one is we really need to have the network function vendors behaving like software vendors. So we need to rely, I would say, on proper deployment descriptors, we need to rely on trusted public report or OCI report where we can just pull the artifact. We need to have automation in the deployment. We can also perhaps have a very last important one. It's the end-to-end observability because when you are stacking the infrastructure up to a whole the network function you need to make a 5G running. It's very huge and it may be extremely siloed. We really need to have an observability that help us to manage or to troubleshoot when we need it, the full stack. And here, once again, I truly believe that Cloudnative ecosystem with the way I would say Cloudnative application could be made observable. We could have shared you things that need to be followed in this journey.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:53):
Okay. Excellent. Well, Philippe, thanks very much for giving us all of those great insights into how Cloudnative Telco sector is developing and look forward to catching up with you again in the future. Thank you. Thanks for having me.