A Practical, Low-Cost Path for Telecoms to Enter the Cloud Business

If a book seller like Amazon can succeed as a cloud provider, why are telecoms so slow to get into the game?

I suspect the barriers are more cultural than technical. Telecoms seem cautious to jump into new markets. I’ve read that it’s because cloud attracts the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, but that’s not the real reason. Competition is not the fear, but the memories of the dotcom crash and how telecoms didn’t succeed in the Internet services space.

Yet the cloud business is not a Hosting or Access business. Cloud is a pure network infrastructure play, and telecoms should feel comfortable there; it’s where they are making their living. What’s more, telecom service providers know a great deal about managing software in big data centers – so the stars are aligned.

Application Performance Monitoring of the Amazon Cloud

In the past two years, great progress has been made in the development of robust tools and APIs to support the cloud, so there’s no reason why a small- to medium-sized telco can’t enter the cloud business in a few short months – and do it affordably.

The key enabler is application performance monitoring (APM). You simply must have real-time visibility into the health and capacity of web servers, databases, application servers, virtual and cloud environments so you can turn up other cloud databases and servers before the end user experience degrades. For instance, using APM, you can connect directly to Amazon Web Services (AWS) service using APIs supplied by Amazon. These APIs allow you to collect full performance metrics on what’s happening in the Amazon cloud infrastructure.

We recently completed a major update to our application performance monitoring solutions so we can better support cloud providers. The beauty of the latest APM solutions is they can discover applications in the Amazon cloud, analyze the metrics, and automatically trigger actions such as restarting or stopping an Amazon server when certain capacities or thresholds are met.

We think automation of cloud provisioning is a great leap forward. The whole purpose of cloud and virtual computing is to take advantages of economies of scale. In a similar way, we think APM’s ability to automate resource provisioning delivers additional “human" economies of scale. Imagine what a burden it would be for a system administrator to log into the Amazon web console and manually turn resources up or down. And if your cloud environment scales to dozens or hundreds of cloud instances, productivity would suffer.

Building Your Own Private Cloud and Employing Virtual Environments like VMware and Hyper-V

Leveraging Amazon or another cloud provider’s infrastructure is certainly the fastest way to get into the cloud market. But longer term, most telecoms will build their own infrastructure and use software such as VMware, Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer.  

Similar to Amazon cloud control, APM software supports the automated provisioning of virtual machines, with only slight variations. For instance, with Microsoft’s Hyper-V you don’t use APIs but the WMI (Window Management Instrumentation) protocol for collecting the data. Basically, the user creates a script for a particular “action" in the APM. If the number of active sessions on a Tomcat server shoots up, the APM can initiate the action on VMware to restart a virtual machine. Other thresholds you could use as a trigger are: CPU utilization going over 80%, memory running low, or disk space coming close to full capacity.

Another nice thing about the latest APM software is it’s completely user configurable. Based on historical trending, you can set capacities to manage and control 50+ out-of-the-box apps and servers in your cloud environment – all from one system console. 

Conclusion

The winning telecom carriers in the cloud will be the ones who get in on the cloud game early, shake out the technical issues and realize the economies of scale. They will attract and keep customers. 

The latest application performance monitoring tools can essentially jumpstart a telecom in the cloud business. Looking back, APM tools have made great progress over the years.  Remember the “self-healing networks" that IBM promoted in the early to mid 2000s? Application Performance Monitoring was the key technology behind that.  

And the difference today is that instead of buying an array of tools to make APM work, today you can buy one self-contained system that has it all and costs in the tens of thousands of dollars instead of millions.

Whether you leverage Amazon’s cloud, a partner’s cloud, or one you build yourself, an APM solution coupled with automated resource provisioning could save you months of development time and get you into the cloud faster so you can gain experience and beat your rivals to the punch.

Eric Wegner is a 20-year veteran of the industry and has 10 years of experience with ZOHO Corp. (formerly AdventNet) working on large and complex network management infrastructures for network equipment manufacturers, service providers and military contractors. Eric joined the company as the first sales person and is now business development manager leading the WebNMS division in North America.