The growing demand for higher network capacity and scale creates two primary challenges for service and cloud providers: declining profitability and increased operational complexity. Not surprisingly, service providers are rethinking network architecture to address these challenges. Dudy Cohen, senior director of product marketing, DriveNets, discusses why savvy service providers are adapting cloud architecture principles to network design.

Cloud-native networking gives service providers an innovative and cost-effective way to build networks by disaggregating software and hardware, using standard white boxes, incorporating virtualization, and running multiple applications over a shared pool of resources. It applies the cloud approach to service provider networks, significantly simplifying network architecture, lowering costs, enabling innovation, and increasing profitability.

As service providers increasingly embrace these software and cloud-native architectures, it’s important to focus on building a successful network cloud to enable better resource utilization, service scaling, and more valuable economic models.

See More: SD-WAN Is Ready To Remove Its Training Wheels

What a Successful Network Cloud Looks Like

Incumbent monolithic-architecture networks are saddled with high infrastructure costs and lack the flexibility to innovate and evolve without having to invest in more hardware. Cloud-based-architecture networks, on the other hand, are open, highly scalable and simple to operate, giving service providers a low-cost option for upgrading networks.

A successful cloud-native architecture will include: 

• Disaggregation: An abstraction layer allows network function software to run on top of non-proprietary  hardware.
• Distribution: Clusters of  networking hardware (white boxes) are grouped and abstracted toward the application layer as a single entity. This results in  easy scaling and multi-level disaggregation. 
• Cloud-native: Network functions run in containers over the shared infrastructure.
• Multiservice: Multiple network functions run over a  shared pool of resources, simultaneously.
• Multivendor: The network functions mentioned above can come from multiple software vendors. 
• Optimized networking: White box hardware infrastructure – based on networking-optimized ASICs, (Network processing units – NPUs, and an abstraction layer that manages the compute and networking resources — optimizes the network’s applications and reduces the overall hardware required.
• Orchestration: Orchestration automates multiple tasks throughout the network lifecycle, resulting in more efficient network planning, operation and troubleshooting. 

Once all of these features are applied to service provider networks, the result is an open, software-based architecture that’s more efficient.

See More: Why the Future of Networks Is WAN Convergence

The Benefits of Hyperscale Economics for Cloud-Native Networking

To understand the benefits of cloud-native networking, service providers need look no further than at hyperscalers. Hyperscale providers serve as a model for using cloud-like architecture to enable new revenue streams from expanded service offerings.

When hardware and software are decoupled, hardware becomes a virtual, consumable resource for the software, as opposed to a rigid monolith. Cloud-native software is built dynamically to scale, and every software element consumes only the hardware it specifically needs to scale, as performance requires.

By incorporating cloud-native networking, service providers can efficiently build and scale their networks while lowering costs by unifying cost-optimized hardware building blocks and optimizing resource utilization.

Just as cloud computing has led to unprecedented innovation for hyperscalers and data centers, the same will be true for service providers with cloud-native networks. Not only will networks become more profitable, but service providers will be able to expand new services more quickly and offer better services to their customers.

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