Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:07):
I am Sean McManus with TelecomTV and I'm delighted to be joined today by Amir Rao, who is the Director Product Management, EC2 Edge at AWS. Welcome.

Amir Rao, AWS (00:18):
Thanks Sean. Thanks for having me on the show.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:20):
Let me ask you first of all what AWS's value proposition is for telco. Tell us about the customer problems you're solving.

Amir Rao, AWS (00:27):
So Sean, we are a cloud provider and we want to be the cloud provider for all of our telco customers across the value chain of the business and across the topology of their network to simplify their cost structures, to improve their bottom line performance, to allow them to build new services faster, cheaper, bring those services to the industry, to the market, to the enterprises, to the consumers. And in doing so, in process of doing so, simplify their cost of operations because as the industry is adopting cloud, managing a three or four layered cake with different hardware, different operating system, different Kubernetes version, then worrying about observability, worrying about the assurance is a very, very complex problem. Historically, the operators used to get in appliance and everything was working. Now they have to deal with getting the hardware sorted and they have to worry about the day zero integration, the day one and day two lifecycle management. That's a lot of complexity. So that is why we want to bring our cloud across the value chain of their business so that they can run application in AWS availability zone in AWS local zone, but also at the edge on their premises using AWS cloud services on their premises so that they don't have to worry about having three or four different cloud stacks across the network.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (01:49):
So to that ends, tell us what's you're announcing this week.

Amir Rao, AWS (01:52):
So it's all about edge. So the final frontier for us has been how do we bring AWS cloud at the edge, which we already do through our services AWS outposts, but do it in a way which is price performance oriented for the telecom networks, which can process extremely high throughput at a minimal footprint, simplifying their cost of operations. So that is what we are doing. We are announcing AWS outpost services and in the process we are introducing two new AWS offerings and new AWS outpost racks that can go on any traffic aggregation layer, which can be used to host the network 5G core UPF user plane function, the 5G ran CU network function, as well as any other network function from a control plane perspective that can actually meet the requirements, the historical requirements of hundreds of gigabits of throughput, even going up to scaling up to terabytes of throughput per second per location.

(02:53):
And you'd hear a few testimonials from some of our customers as well. So that's one of the announcement. The second announcement is taking AWS cloud furthest to the edge, right at the base of the cell tower. It's going to be a smaller form factor, AWS outpost server, a two U server that can run the 5G cloud, ran virtual, ran open, ran any DU technology from a tier one provider. And there we are basically simplifying for the industry for the customers the need to have continuous integration between the R use between the DU application, worry about the acceleration inline and leukocyte. So we are providing AWS outpost services in a server in a small server form factor two U form factor that can actually support open ran virtual ran and customers can have a plug and play experience. This AWS outpost server, A two U server that we will be bringing right to the edge can actually be deployed in multiple configurations.

(03:56):
We will give complete flexibility of deployment options to the industry, to the our telco customers so that they don't have to change their transport schema, their transmission systems. This two U server can actually run the DU but it can also run the DU at the edge. It can also be clustered and to implement a centralized distributed run du ran implementation and in doing so it'll support tier D, it'll support ft d, it'll support massive MIMO. You will see carrier aggregation feature demoed at our booth, which is only very, very few handset supported. It's two gigabit per second of throughput coming down. So that is we are providing complete feature parity and the performance parity compared to a device or appliance space 5G radio and I think it's going to solve a lot of problems throughout the industry.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (04:48):
Tell us about the customer validation that you have for these offerings.

Amir Rao, AWS (04:51):
Yeah, we've been at it for quite a number of years and for the new outpost racks, Telefonica Germany is our lead customer. This is why the new outpost racks are actually in preview. The racks have been shipped. You would also see a video testimonial with racks on Telefonica Germany site for the cloud ran. You will hear in the media alert that's going to go, that's been announced that you will Orange Telefonica and do networks from UAE. These are our first three customers and we will be building pilots throughout the rest of the year for them.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (05:35):
Great. Now I imagine a lot of people will be wondering whether this is based on telco specific technology or whether you are bringing your standard stack to the edge. Tell us about that.

Amir Rao, AWS (05:45):
Yeah, one of the major needs of our Telco customers is that they want to see AWS bringing its scale and its innovation from a cloud perspective. So we are actually leveraging that. So AWS outpost, it's the same architecture that we use for all of our other outpost offering the racks and essentially it's the same cloud stacks powered by the same AWS Nitro, which allows exactly the same services that the customers use in the region. The same Amazon EC2, the same Amazon Elastic Kubernetes service known as EKS, the same Amazon cloud formation, CloudWatch, all of the same services will be used both at the Outpost rack as well as the outpost server. And we are also, even from a silicon perspective, we are leveraging the same. So it's going to be the instances that we will be using in our Rack Formm factor, exactly the same technology that we use in our regions. And then even for the cloud ran the server that we are designing for cloud ran, it uses Amazon Graviton three base based server. It's the same technology that we use in our region. What we've just done is we've met the form factor requirements, the specific synchronization and acceleration requirement through other hardware ingenuity within the server. But we have ensured that the stack remains the same, the services remain the same, and we leverage the silicon scale that we have that we use in our regions. Brilliant.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (07:16):
Tell us how customers and partners can work with AWS.

Amir Rao, AWS (07:20):
Yeah, we'd love to engage. We are already engaged with a lot of customers, both for their 5G core deployment on the rack form factor, as well as the DU ran deployment, but we would love to continue to engage. Nokia is a very, very close partner of ours. They are the ones who've deployed 5G core in Telefonica Germany. Similarly for the cloud ran server that we are talking about is also using Nokia as a supplier. We are also working with the other major partners in the industry and apart from that, we would love to engage with the customers, understand their needs. They can reach out to me or my team. We are at the show. We'd love to have you visit our booth, see the technology in working in syn Atrium, D four in AWS booth in the South hall, and we'd love to take the conversations forward with you.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (08:17):
Amir, thank you very much.

Amir Rao, AWS (08:19):
Thanks Sean. Thanks for having me on the show.