In this article, we discuss the need for businesses to leverage Apache Kafka to better implement scalable, real-time infrastructures for event streaming.
Event Streaming is a hot topic in Telecommunications Industry. In the last few months, I have seen various projects leveraging Apache Kafka and its ecosystem to implement scalable real-time infrastructure in OSS and BSS scenarios. This blog post covers the reasons for this trend. Finally, we’ll show a whiteboard video recording exploring the different use cases for event streaming in telcos in detail.
The Evolution of the Telecommunications Industry
The telecommunications industries within the sector of information and communication technology is made up of all telecommunications/telephone companies and internet service providers. It plays a crucial role in the evolution of mobile communications and the information society.
Traditional telephone calls continue to be the industry’s biggest revenue generator in the Telecommunications Industry. But, thanks to advances in network technology, Telecom today is less about voice and increasingly more about text (messaging, email) and images (e.g. video streaming).
High-speed internet access for computer-based data applications, such as broadband information services and interactive entertainment, is pervasive. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) is the main broadband telecom technology. The fastest growth comes from (value-added) services delivered over mobile networks.
Telco Architecture - OSS, BSS and Cloud
The traditional telco landscape is separated into OSS (Operations Support Systems), BSS (Business Support Systems), and OSS-BSS-Integration.
OSS tracks network inventory, assets, and provisioning of services. BSS deals with customer relationship management (CRM) and processes, such as taking orders, processing bills, and collecting payments. Here is an example of such a Telecommunications Industry landscape:
Modern architectures (have to) include one more aspect: Cloud. In almost all other traditional industries, Telcos moves toward the cloud. The consequence is a hybrid architecture. Telco has to stay hybrid forever because a core part of their business is infrastructure. A combination of on-premises data centers, edge processing, and multi-cloud architectures is the new normal in the Telecommunications industry.
Telco Business - CDR (Call Detail Record), Customer 360, Media, and More
The business in the Telecommunications industry did not change that much from an end-user perspective yet. Many basic concepts are still the same. OSS and BSS work together. Call Detail Records (CDR) metadata from phone calls are still processed and analyzed to monitor the infrastructure and sell services to customers. Smartphone contracts and media offerings are still pretty similar, like ten years ago (you just get higher data limits per month).
However, the telecom business for the traditional telecommunications industry is changing significantly these days. It has to change. Otherwise, competitors like Apple or Netflix will take over most of the business.
I like how this picture from Huawei describes these changes in the digital transformation in the Telco industry:
The trend goes towards an open ecosystem, partnering, context-specific personalized offerings, multichannel, improved customer service, and new innovative products.
These trends create a lot of challenges for technical implementation. Traditional technologies that were used in the last 20 years do not work to realize this digital transformation. Requirements include real-time processing at scale, decoupled and flexible applications and infrastructure, and still a reliable system with zero downtime and zero data loss.
The combination of these requirements makes clear why more and more Telco projects and infrastructure are built with event streaming in mind and leveraging the de facto standard Apache Kafka and its ecosystem.
#open source #big data #apache #kafka #telecom #middleware #oss #telco
