AUSTIN, TEXAS – Alicia Abella, AT&T’s AVP of the cloud technologies and services research organization, discussed the communication giant’s ongoing transition to operating on a telco cloud platform.
In an interview with RCR Wireless News at the IEEE GlobeCom show in Austin, Abella called the move to become a cloud-based enterprise a “big transformation” and a “complex undertaking.”
Abella, who has a PhD and master’s degree in computer science from Columbia University, started by explaining AT&T’s motivation to move to a telco cloud.
“We decided that it would be important to move into the software defined networking and cloud environment because we were having to depend too much on customized hardware that was very expensive both to purchase and to maintain and to configure and to update.”
In addition to the expense, Abella said working on custom hardware was also time-consuming, which slowed down time-to-market.
“But with the cloud technologies, there is this promise of being able to do all this: Be able to do service deployment quickly and to be able to also configure and maintain all these services and applications much more readily and without the cost of these customized hardware.”
Instead of costly custom tech, “What we’re using now is commodity hardware. Cheap, off-the-shelf hardware that we can just configure very quickly and have our applications and services running on them.”
Abella described some challenges to transitioning to cloud computing, including data security and quality of service.
“One of the aspects of moving into this cloud environment, in order to really get the cost efficiencies that we want and is promised by cloud, we need to be able to take multiple services and applications and run them at the same time on that same hardware.”
She said running multiple apps at the same time on the same hardware required AT&T to develop “performance isolation” techniques that ensure the services don’t interfere.
Check out the RCR Wireless News YouTube channel for more from the IEEE GlobeCom show.
