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Darragh Grealish

AWS announces Wavelength and 5G Edge

This Month, on August 6th AWS announced general availability of "Wavelength compute edge platform for mobile and IoT applications". The physical AWS hardware that will be installed on mobile edge network, on the mobile provider premise(s) and will bring AWS Cloud Technologies closer to its customers. It's very exciting news for 56K.Cloud as we have been very focused around 5G and IoT topics, how it plays in bringing real and practical benefits to both working from home, on mobile applications while on the move and IoT connected devices. Everything from your home office to IoT devices both inside and outside our homes supporting a digital society. With 5G and the latest 4G+ revisions we will see new possibilities that were otherwise not at all possible.

Below is AWS perspective in number of 5G and Edge Computing opportunity into the 2025

But is this new? Not Exactly, many mobile and telecommunication operators have for a long time offered Over The Top (OTT) applications, but hosted on there own platform, on-net located on the operators network serving just that customer base. Again back in 2011  Ericsson and Akamai attempted to build an Edge CDN deployment during the 3G boom, but at the time, the networks were still very much lacking packet switching at the mobile edge and the developer experience wasn't as advanced or at least seeing the value.

In Re:Invent 2019 we learned that AWS and Verizon have been working for over two years on a new way to approach this challenge, The result is Wavelength, and finally this service is now GA and available to anyone who build applications on AWS for customers of Verizon 5G network.  Here you will find the remote press conference that took place as a joint effort to launch with Verizon 5G team and AWS Wavelength team.

About two minutes in the press conference kicks off with the VP of Business, (woman's name) Verizon 5G Edge proving an introduction. Creating the link between the advances in 5G mobile access and building the story for Edge Compute. They share the objective to make it an effortless experience for developers to enabled new application use cases with the features of 5G network and 5G edge devices (such as handsets) that would otherwise not be possible. Such features are ultra-low latency, coupled with real-time edge compute, ML interference.

This gives Mobile Operators a second chance at monetising there network with 5G and Edge Cloud

Along the promise of ultra-low latency, huge bandwidth the flexibility, we will start to see these features and configurations sold as dynamic data plans. They will operate as "5G Slices" which can be requested of the network, tagged with a price per usage and consumed on request of the 5G application. This give mobile operators a "second chance" at monetising there network with 5G and Edge Cloud. This is what is exciting for the opportunity dynamic edge compute can bring when merged with the promise of 5G and it's associated features. However we are not just limited to this new technology, existing LTE deployments such as 4G and 4G+ will have a limited set of features back ported to enabled too the dynamic network configurations.

In the announcement last week, what was followed by a nice panel and Q/A discussions. Which gave some great insight into the background of the project along with the possibilities that I described above.

Regions: California, and Boston, East cost, on the Verizon network.(we believe Chicago area will be next, (see video, Chicago LAB demos)

What services will be available on Wavelength local zones?

  • Compute: EC2, various instances will be
  • Storage: Elastic Block Storage
  • Container Service: ECS and EKS (work nodes)
  • Network: VPC, Subnets, Security Groups all exist, but with the addition of new gateway component.
  • Carrier Gateway performs a NAT, function like and IGW functions already, an interface with various Mobile APN, and soon 5G Slices
  • Control Plane: This will be managed by the primary region Wavelength is attached to

What would an Edge Reference Architecture look like?

  • Core Applications series sin primary AWS Region,
  • AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for hosting asynchronous operations,
  • Machine Learning using Sage Maker Operates for EKS workers on Wavelength zone
  • Low-Latency Interfere, on Wavelength local-zones and latency sensitive application features.
  • AWS Cloud Map Service, use API calls to cloud map, to make services discovery

Deeper dive in how to use local zones is described in this blog post:

Many more use cases are possible of course, such use cases we've been also working on here at 56K.Cloud Hexagon HxDR GIS platfrom, is just one of our customers that could further benefit with 5G Edge Cloud technologies. Enabling both there SaaS business and IoT sensors out in the field.

If your today located in Boston and The Bay Area, Two local zones will be first accessible, but you must register interest, feel free to contact us for support in that. And if you already are a Verizon customer to test you these benefits. Verzion of a 5G Edge Lab, some thing similar to the Sunrise Joint Innovator Center here in Zurich, Switzerland. Where everything from VR to IIoT is show-cased, we wrote about the center last month

We look forward to seeing AWS Wavelength deployed in Europe and Switzerland in the near future. This will enabled a huge opportunity for both Edge Application developers and mobile operators like Swisscom, Sunrise, and Salt. With the available for cloud enabled technologies at the edge we will see a build out new applications as well as further enabling existing mobile applications. Myself and the 56K.Cloud team are looking forward to being part of that application development and enabling both mobile app developers, IoT and Embedded System developers with mobile operators and AWS customers to make the most of 5G application development.

Find out more about 56K.Cloud

We love Cloud, IoT, Containers, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code. (and 5G) If you are interested in chatting connect with us on Twitter, 30min coffee or drop us an email: info@56K.Cloud. We hope you found this article helpful. If there is anything you would like to contribute or you have questions, please let us know!

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Darragh Grealish

Co-Founder and CTO