AWS Introduces New AWS Outposts Offerings for Telecom Workloads

At Mobile World Congress, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Outposts racks for high-throughput, network-intensive workloads and AWS Outposts servers for Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) workloads. These new offerings enable telecom service providers (telcos) to extend AWS infrastructure and services to on-premises deployments requiring low latency, high throughput, and real-time performance. Both solutions will be generally available later this year to support workloads such as 5G Core user plane function (UPF), RAN centralized unit (CU), and RAN distributed unit (DU).

Modernizing Telecom Networks with AWS Outposts  

AWS Outposts racks and servers help telcos transition from legacy networks to cloud-based virtualized networks, improving efficiency and scalability. These solutions extend AWS cloud infrastructure and services from AWS Regions and metro areas to on-premises data centers and edge locations.  

The AWS infrastructure ecosystem—including AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Outposts—supports telcos with low-latency processing, migration and modernization, data residency, and local data processing requirements.

“With the new AWS Outposts offerings, the AWS Cloud Continuum can now extend to the furthest edge of the 5G network, allowing Telcos to run their entire 5G network including 5G Core and 5G RAN on AWS cloud services. The AWS Outposts rack offering features a new architecture that allows cost efficient capacity scaling to meet the growing throughput demands on the most densely populated 5G networks globally. The AWS Outposts server offering supports both Open and Virtual RAN architectures with complete feature and performance parity with appliance-based 5G RAN. These offerings will empower Telcos to build a future-proof cloud infrastructure to support 5G and beyond. The breakthrough innovations will enable superior end-customer experiences, faster network deployment, better price performance, and reduced cost of ownership." - Dave Brown, Vice President of Compute and Networking, Amazon Web Services

AWS Outposts Racks for High-Throughput, Network-Intensive Workloads

AWS has introduced AWS Outposts racks designed to support high-throughput, network-intensive on-premises workloads. These racks provide cost-efficient traffic scaling, addressing the increasing demands on 5G Core User Plane Function (UPF) and Radio Access Network (RAN) Centralized Unit (CU) workloads. By offering flexibility in workload placement based on latency, throughput, and traffic aggregation requirements, the solution enables the deployment of advanced 5G use cases.  

Operators can utilize AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, tools, and CI/CD pipelines consistently across locations, reducing operational complexity, minimizing integration costs, and accelerating feature development.  

Key Features and Benefits

- Support for High-Throughput, Network-Intensive Workloads 
  AWS Outposts racks leverage Amazon EC2 bare metal instances and a bare metal network fabric, allowing telcos to scale performance efficiently.  

- Enhanced Security and Performance with AWS Nitro System  
  The solution is built on the AWS Nitro System, delivering security and performance benefits similar to Amazon EC2 instances in AWS Regions, extending these capabilities to distributed telco network locations.  

- Automated Deployment, Management, and Scaling
  AWS Outposts racks support pre-validated Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) add-ons, enabling the automation of deployment, management, and scaling for microservices-based 5G network functions.  

- Improved Operational Efficiency with AWS Services
  Telcos can run AWS services locally and integrate with broader AWS Regional services. They can monitor 5G network performance using Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and Amazon Managed Grafana, while leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning services such as Amazon Athena and Amazon SageMaker to simplify network operations and analytics.

“The start of our 5G cloud core marks a decisive step in the transformation of our network architecture. We are proud to have the first fully cloud-native 5G core network deployed on AWS with a million subscribers already being served through it. As a leading mobile network operator with millions of customers in Germany, we want the most modern technology platform without making compromises on the functionality and reliability of our services. The new AWS Outposts racks harmonize with our next phase in our development of the network of the future, catering to the high throughput and low latency needs of our nationwide 5G core. AWS Outposts supports us to offer excellent 5G operational experiences, and enabling new digital applications for our customers.” - Mallik Rao, Chief Technology & Enterprise Officer (CTEO) of O2 Telefónica.

"For modern cloud-native 5G Core networks, our customers demand a cloud architecture that meets high throughput processing requirements while ensuring simplified operations, enhanced security, and full automation. This drove our collaboration with AWS, leveraging the breadth of AWS services and Nokia’s industry leading telco expertise and commitment to automation to build the right solution. The new AWS Outposts racks enable porting and deploying Nokia’s 5G Core workloads on AWS services in customers’ data centers.” - Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia.

“The start of our 5G cloud core marks a decisive step in the transformation of our network architecture. We are proud to have the first fully cloud-native 5G core network deployed on AWS with a million subscribers already being served through it. As a leading mobile network operator with millions of customers in Germany, we want the most modern technology platform without making compromises on the functionality and reliability of our services. The new AWS Outposts racks harmonize with our next phase in our development of the network of the future, catering to the high throughput and low latency needs of our nationwide 5G core. AWS Outposts supports us to offer excellent 5G operational experiences, and enabling new digital applications for our customers.” - Mallik Rao, Chief Technology & Enterprise Officer (CTEO) of O2 Telefónica

"For modern cloud-native 5G Core networks, our customers demand a cloud architecture that meets high throughput processing requirements while ensuring simplified operations, enhanced security, and full automation. This drove our collaboration with AWS, leveraging the breadth of AWS services and Nokia’s industry leading telco expertise and commitment to automation to build the right solution. The new AWS Outposts racks enable porting and deploying Nokia’s 5G Core workloads on AWS services in customers’ data centers.” - Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia.

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