Master Thesis Electrical Engineering September 2011 CLOUD COMPUTING FOR TELECOM SYSTEMS SAGAR SAPKOTA KHAWAR SHEHZAD School of Engineering i Blekinge Institute of Technology 371 79 Karlskrona Sweden This thesis is submitted to the School of Computing at Blekinge Institute of Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. The thesis is equivalent to 20 weeks of full time studies. Contact Information: Author(s): Sagar Sapkota E-mail: [email protected] Khawar Shehzad E-mail: [email protected] External advisor(s): Andrzej Lisowski Company/Organization name: Ericsson Telecommunicatie B.V., Netherlands Phone: + 311 6124 9154 Erik Brakkee Company/Organisation name: Ericsson Telecommunicatie B.V., Netherlands University advisor(s): Prof. Lars Lundberg School of Computing E-mail: [email protected] School of Computing Internet : www.bth.se/com Blekinge Institute of Technology Phone : +46 455 38 50 00 371 79 Karlskrona Fax : +46 455 38 50 57 Sweden i i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We would like to thank our supervisor Prof. Lars Lundberg for giving us opportunity to work under his supervision and providing us with guidelines and suggestions throughout the project. We appreciate technical guidance, support, and encouragement given by our facilitators Jan Van Der Meer, Andrzej Lisowski and Erik Brakkee from Ericsson Telecommunicatie B.V., Netherlands. We would also like to thank survey participants, who contributed towards survey part of this thesis. And finally we would like to thank our families, and friends for their support. iii ABSTRACT Context: Cloud computing is reshaping the service-delivery and business-models in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The Information Technology (IT) sector has benefited from it in the previous 3-5 years. Despite the attraction of cloud computing, it is required to have an effective application migration strategy. Cloud computing with its diverse provisioning models makes it possible for telecom vendors and service providers to decide effective service and business models. Currently, cloud computing contains security, performance and dimensioning considerations for telecom companies. Objectives: This thesis assesses the trends and issues associated with the cloud, with telecommunications perspective, while leveraging the cloud to come to a decision on a suitable cloud environment for telecom grade applications. Analysis of maturity of public cloud (in terms of compatibility, consolidation, compliance and standardization) in general and Amazon cloud in particular, is part of the thesis objective. While doing so, deployment of a telecom-grade product in the Amazon cloud will be evaluated against the current on-premise deployment. We want to identify architectural difference between the two domains, and what issues are faced when a migration is planned. This evaluation between two systems, i.e. on-premise and the cloud will significantly contribute to the research and can be used when making business decisions. Methods: We conducted literature review, survey, and a case study, assessing the above mentioned objectives. Research papers from academia and industry were chosen for literature review; personnel, with experience in cloud computing, were chosen for the survey; and a telecom-grade platform was used to assess the migration issues on Amazon cloud in the case study. The Ericsson Composition Engine (ECE) was used to check what deployment issues it can have on Amazon cloud. Its on-premise Reference Deployment Architecture was compared with the cloud-based Reference Deployment Architecture. This case study served as a confirmation to results obtained in the literature review and survey. Results: In the literature review and survey, we found motivations, trends, current applications, and challenges of cloud computing for telecom. It was found from the case study that Amazon Web Services (AWS) lacks application and network centric attributes that are required in ECE deployment. We propose recommendations that can be integrated with ECE while deploying it in a public cloud. Conclusions: Companies are choosing cloud vendors that uniquely give ease of migration and control, based on application needs and compatibility. ECE cannot be directly migrated to AWS, unless we provide Amazon specific modifications in the architecture. The survey and literature review support a private and/or hybrid strategy for ECE, along with the inclusion of cloud networking into the ECE package. Keywords: Cloud Computing, Telecommunications, Amazon Web Services, Ericsson Composition Engine iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS API Application Programming Interface AWS Amazon Web Services CSP Cloud Service Providers DB Data Base EBS Elastic Block Storage EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud ECE Ericsson Composition Engine ELB Elastic Load Balancer IaaS Infrastructure as a Service ICT Information and Communications Technology LAN Local Area Network MNO Mobile Network Operator NGN Next Generation Network NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology OSS Operations Support System PaaS Platform as a Service PL Pay Load QoS Quality of Service RDA Reference Deployment Architecture RDS Relational Database Service RHEL Red Hat Enterprise Linux SaaS Software as a Service v SAIL Scalable and Adaptive Internet soLutions SC Service Control SCTP Stream Control Transmission Protocol SDK Software Development Kit SIP Session Initiation Protocol SLA Service Level Agreement SMB Small Medium Business SOA Service Oriented Architecture SPI Software Platform Infrastructure SQS Simple Queue Service VLAN Virtual Local Area Network VM Virtual Machine VPC Virtual Private Cloud VPN Virtual Private Network vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................................................................................................................................III ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................................... IV LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................................................................ V INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 OVERVIEW ....................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 MOTIVATION AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ....................................................................................................... 1 1.3 THESIS ORGANIZATION .................................................................................................................................... 2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK.................................................................................................................. 3 2.1 CLOUD COMPUTING ................................................................................................................................................. 3 2.1.1 Definition ......................................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1.2 Deployment Models ..................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1.3 Service Delivery Models (a.k.a. Market Segments) ..................................................................................... 4 2.2 KEY TECHNOLOGIES AND PRACTICES IN THE CLOUD ....................................................................................... 5 2.2.1 Virtualization ............................................................................................................................................... 5 2.2.2 Load Balancing and Scalability .................................................................................................................. 6 2.2.3 Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Provisioning ................................................................................................. 6 2.2.4 Identity and Access Management (IAM) ..................................................................................................... 6 2.2.5 High Performance Computing Technologies .............................................................................................. 6 2.3 CLOUD VENDORS AND PLATFORMS ......................................................................................................................... 7 2.3.1 Public Cloud Service Providers .................................................................................................................. 8 2.3.2 Private Cloud Platform Providers ............................................................................................................. 9 2.3.3 Open Platform Cloud Computing .............................................................................................................. 10 2.4 ECE AND AMAZON WEB SERVICES ................................................................................................................ 10 2.4.1 Ericsson Composition Engine ................................................................................................................... 10 2.4.1.1 Default Reference Deployment Architecture (RDA) ........................................................................................