The workshop on Telecommunications VITEL 2023 was held between 5th and 6th of June 2023 in Bled, Slovenia.
The importance of cloud computing has increased significantly in recent years, not only in the world of information technologies and business applications, but also in the world of communications. The topic of this year’s workshop is “cloud-based networks”. It covers the most modern approaches to their development, introduction and operation. Investments in the information cloud of the last ten years have successfully mitigated the consequences of the covid-19 crisis and enable hybrid work as a new reality.
Networks are transitioning into the world of the Internet and service architecture. They have the ability to run on commercial equipment with increased computing and storage power and share a flexible infrastructure. Thus, the conditions for modern cloud-based networks or for the renovation of existing networks have been created. Cloud computing provides users with an approach that is significantly more agile and flexible, resource-efficient and cost-effective. The required cloud resources can be provided privately for the use of a specific group of organizations, or publicly, where the resources are accessed according to the principles of multi-tenancy. For users who want to take advantage of both, a hybrid cloud environment is available.
Developers use modern frameworks to develop microservices, which are most often combined in containers. This simplifies the configuration of cloud infrastructure compared to virtual machines and enables faster deployment of cloud applications along with their application interfaces. Cloud management technologies and container orchestrators are an important part of supporting automation. Here, DevOps stands out as a set of such practices while simultaneously improving security and reliability. The latter are constantly being put to the test in such designed networks.
Changes from existing, classically designed networks to cloud-based networks bring many challenges to network operators. At the workshop, we will try to address as many of them as possible, including:
– stack of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS),
– cloud infrastructure certification process,
– integrated cloud services and platforms,
– microservices in the cloud,
– container-based infrastructure of cloud-based networks,
– cloud services from a telecommunications operator,
– IT and business services,
– state cloud,
– private 5G networks on cloud-based infrastructure,
– radio access network (RAN) in the cloud,
– security of cloud services,
– security of networks and information systems at the national level (NIS-2 directive),
– a customized user interface,
– DevOps as a service in the transition to cloud-based networks,
– the importance of the open science cloud.