Everyone in telecom is surely aware of the push of public cloud providers into the telco world. Amazon and Microsoft have long offered telcos hosting of elements of 5G and other “telco cloud” applications. Google now wants to get into the game, or rather get into it on a more serious basis. There are a lot of good reasons why that might work, and some that it could be more difficult than Google expects.
I blogged about Google’s position in the telco space before, noting that the telcos have long been a bit enamored of Google as a partner. Google already runs what’s arguably the largest network built from hosted components, and while they’ve been a distant third in the cloud overall, and even with telcos, they are still recognized as a major innovator. What they announced this week was Google Distributed Cloud, a strategy that not only addresses the telco 5G hosting that Google’s competitors want a piece of, but the broader area of distributed computing, even for enterprises.
What GDC (I hate typing long names, so forgive my use of the acronym!) does is abstract the platform-as-a-service feature set of Google Cloud from the hosting. It’s not unlike early initiatives from Amazon and Microsoft to host cloud elements on the customer premises, but it has a broader intended application. You can run GDC on anything, including Google’s cloud hosts, edge computing, other clouds, premises or partner data centers, you name it. This is a really important initiative, particularly for the telcos.
The biggest problem that telcos face in dipping their toes into hosted service functions via the public cloud, is avoiding getting locked in. Most of the public cloud offerings for telecom are specialized to the provider, to the point where it would be complicated for a telco to move to another cloud or to decide to pull cloud-hosted stuff back inside to their own telco cloud infrastructure. GDC, by creating a portable software platform that can be hosted on nearly anything, eliminates that risk.
Google says that its Anthos multi-Kubernetes-cluster strategy is at the core of GDC. Operationally, it unifies all the hosting environments, and it appears for the moment to be the way that GDC can support multi-cloud. While the statement of multi-cloud support is explicit in GDC’s diagrams, the details of how that would work, given that “multi-cloud” means multiple cloud providers, is sparse. Thus, I can’t say for sure that the GDC platform itself could be hosted on another provider’s IaaS, though it seems possible on the surface. Operationally, Anthos would unify whatever you could run in other clouds with the rest of GDC.
What makes GDC clever is that it’s the first true functionally layered public cloud model; the application’s view of the cloud is created by the platform, which can then be hosted in multiple ways. That means the applications run wherever GDC can be hosted, and that means that telecom applications like 5G RAN and Core can be hosted on GDC and tightly integrated with edge computing applications that would be coupled (explicitly or just to control latency) with those 5G elements.
The Google Distributed Cloud Edge offering, the one that seems directly aimed at telcos, is a managed service that presumably could be hosted on Google’s own cloud or edge elements, or on the operators’ premises. So far, at least, Google doesn’t appear to be bundling 5G functions with its service, so operators could host any compatible 5G functionality. Google has been working closely with vendors like Ericsson and Nokia on this, though.
For enterprises, the primary offering is Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, which supports both enterprise edge and the data center. This model of GDC means that you could build applications to a single model and run them anywhere. The run-anywhere capabilities of GDC would likely be of great value in enterprise IoT applications, where an event flow might well extend from a device all the way through an enterprise edge device, through the public cloud, and into the data center. Of course, other latency-sensitive applications would also benefit, and so would any cloud-centric application that relied on component hosting shifting between data center and cloud.
There are obviously a lot of positives to GDC, but what about those “difficulties” that I cited at the opening to this blog? I see two specific ones, and while neither are insurmountable, both could limit Google’s ability to fully realize the potential of GDC.
The first issue is (sadly) hardly uncommon in our market; it’s hazy positioning. The first most people will hear of a new offering like this is a set of stories that come out of the initial material the supplier provides, and that material is, in the case of GDC, a bit muddy. They show a multi-cloud example in their diagram but never explain how that’s delivered. They talk about GDC in some places in a very enterprise-centric way, and then talk about the edge component in terms of telcos and their edge plans, even though they also talk about GDC as an enterprise edge model.
They never make what I think is the key point, except perhaps in a diagram where it’s implied. GDC is an abstraction of the cloud as a PaaS, a platform that isolates users and applications from hosting. Will that point be captured by stories? None of the ones I’ve seen picked up on the abstraction or layered-platform angles, which to me means that Google didn’t nail down the key features that would differentiate it from competitive offerings.
Which are the second issue. The Google Distributed Cloud Edge and GDC Hosted elements are previews (the latter is even pre-preview at this point), so Google has pushed out the GDC story well in advance of anyone’s being able to fully execute on it. That’s not necessarily bad, since exploiting GDC will demand some rethinking of application designs, but it gives competitors a lot of time to take their own shot.
The biggest pieces of a distributed-cloud abstract platform layer are the cloud web services, scope of orchestration and management, and the creation of the connection to the hosting layer. Obviously, both Google’s major cloud competitors have the first of these, and Microsoft has positioned Azure as being a platform-as-a-service framework from the first. Beyond that, Microsoft has Azure Arc, which has some similarities to Anthos for management and orchestration; Amazon doesn’t really have a comparable offering yet. The mapping between the distributed cloud layer and hardware might take some effort, but given the state of cloud competition, it’s hard to believe both Amazon and Microsoft haven’t been looking at this all along.
Google is obviously intent on redefining the cloud, not just competing in a marketing lake that others have already defined and seized. That’s a worthy ambition, and if you believe in edge computing it’s likely an essential one. It’s also a major task, but whether Google succeeds and gains a benefit in the space, or fails and remains a third-place player in the cloud market, I think the notion of an “abstract cloud” is here to stay.
