Nokia makes its network functions available on AWS

Nokia’s Common Software Foundation platform now supports Amazon Web Services, which should make them easier to buy and use.

One of the major points of network functions virtualization was to enable a marketplace of network functions that operators could just buy and deploy at scale as and when they need them. That requires the involvement of the public cloud, and AWS currently has around half of the infrastructure as a service market. In other words, if your stuff isn’t compatible with AWS you’re missing out on a massive piece of the public cloud market.

“Our Common Software Foundation continues to drive commercial value forward for our customers including choice of deployment options,” said Bhaskar Gorti, President of Nokia Software. “CSF now enables all our cloud-native network functions and applications on AWS. And when we combine Nokia pre-engineered solutions with AWS deployment, CSPs will be able to commission a new 5G mobile core or provision a new service offering with the click of a button – meaningfully changing CSP economics and operational time frames.”

“Interest in AWS from the CSP market segment beyond IT workloads is growing rapidly,” said Matt Garman, VP of AWS Compute Services. “We are delighted to be working with Nokia and helping them leverage the power of AWS for their network infrastructure solutions and business and operational support applications.”

Nokia and AWS started working together a couple of years ago and the only surprise is that it took Nokia this long to go all-in. Having said that, the slow progress of NFV in general shows how complicated this stuff is and if CSF has now evolved to a point that Nokia can make its network functions more easily available on AWS than its competitors then that could be a significant advantage.