Bringing the cloud to 5G edge with AWS Wavelength
5G has arrived and it has started transforming the internet world. But here we will not discuss about the 5G, rather how cloud providers such as AWS are gearing up for providing better services to customers which are powered by the 5G network. AWS has launched the service called Wavelength through which we can provision the AWS resources in the carrier network through Wavelength Zone.
Now before jumping on to wavelength lets understand how mobile apps traffic journey happens with 5G network.
So, the mobile app on our mobile phone sends requests to a local cell tower. From there, the traffic goes to the metro and regional sites. Now it moves across the internet, and finally, reaches the AWS datacenter where after a few hops access our app servers. Now it works fine for the apps which do not have stringent latency requirements but for latency-sensitive applications, high latency over the internet doesn’t work. Now this is where AWS wavelength comes into picture.
AWS Wavelength is effectively extending the AWS cloud to telecom provider network by taking away the high latency component i.e. internet out of the picture as shown in above architecture. Now this will significantly slash the latency from 100s of milliseconds to a few milliseconds by bringing the application backend on the carrier network. Which means AWS infrastructure resources such as VPCs, EBS volumes, EC2, EKS etc are provisioned directly into telecom providers data centers called as AWS wavelength zones. All the implementation and complexity is hidden behind the same AWS APIs which we are already using.
Wavelength Zone Architecture
Before moving ahead we need to understand what wavelength zones are? All the AWS services which exist within the carrier data center are considered as wavelength zones. This is no different than any other AWS zone just that it sits directly into the AWS data center. Within these wavelength zones we can have EC2 instances, subnets, EBS volumes. Outside the wavelength zone they are connected to a parent AWS region and it is a part of VPC and there is a high bandwidth secure connection from the wavelength zone back to its parent region.
Also another component is required called AWS CGW i.e. AWS carrier gateway which acts like an internet gateway and sits on the edge of the wavelength zone and manages flow of traffic between carrier network and wavelength zone. Carrier gateways allow egress traffic to the internet but not ingress traffic from the internet. It only allows ingress from the carrier network. Which means carrier gateway nats the AWS private IPs used in wavelength zone to the Carrier IPs used on CSP network.
Though we have mentioned we can access these services with the AWS APIs which will give us the same experience the way we use AWS services which are not a part of AWS zones but all the AWS features are not available in wavelength zones. Also every wavelength zone is associated with exactly one parent region.
Below table shows the mapping between wavelength zone and AWS regions. We can also access the latest info at the link. We have to select the wavelength zone based on the region closest to the AWS region where we would need to place the backend of our low latency apps. For example if we want to target New York as an AWS region we need to select “us-east-1-wl1-nyc-wlz-1” as a wavelength zone.
As we mentioned above how wavelength zones are associated with parent regions and there is a mapping between where our users and devices physically are and in which wavelength zone we need to build in. Because of the association with the parent region and having high speed secure connection between AWS zone and wavelength zone, while designing the deployment strategy of apps we must keep on those apps which have low latency requirements in the wavelength zone and rest we can keep in the parent AWS zone.
So, this is the high level understanding of how AWS wavelength helps enhance the true power of 5G.
[Disclaimer: This is a personal blog. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated.]
