At the end of 2019, AWS released AWS Wavelength, an edge computing solution provided by AWS for the 5G market and targeted at 5G application developers.
For AWS, even though 5G networks have been commercially implemented, when UE accesses applications deployed on AWS via the Internet, it still needs to cross multiple network hops (i.e., (UE => gNB => Access ring => Aggregation ring => Backbone Ring => Core Network => Internet => AWS), which cannot fully utilize the characteristics of 5G networks for application innovation.
AWS Wavelength aims to collaborate with telecommunications providers by leveraging the infrastructure deployed by telecommunications providers on Network Edge to deploy AWS’s computing and storage resources at 5G RAN/UPF sites to support 5G applications. In this way, AWS Wavelength can provide 5G application services with millisecond-level low latency for UE to the greatest extent (that is: UE => gNB => Access ring => AWS Wavelength).
AWS has currently reached cooperation agreements with AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Japan’s KDDI, and South Korea’s SK Telecom. As of December 2020, AWS has launched a total of 8 AWS Wavelength Zones. In the future, more areas that AWS Wavelength can cover will also be gradually promoted.
For developers of 5G applications
AWS Wavelength offers an AWS service experience that is exactly the same as AWS Cloud. Users can extend the VPC to one or more Wavelength zones, and then use AWS services to build, run, manage, and scale applications.
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon EBS
- Amazon ECS
- Amazon EKS
- Amazon IAM (Identity and Access Management)
- Amazon CloudFormation
- Amazon Autoscaling
- Such as
Meanwhile, AWS Wavelength can also provide developers with a consistent development experience across multiple telecom operators, enabling them to easily deploy the same 5G application in different 5G networks. That is to say, developers no longer need to separately adapt to different resource/service management interfaces of multiple telecom operators.
With just one AWS account, 5G applications can be deployed in any Wavelength Zone and seamlessly connected to the AWS Region.
Currently, two modes for using AWS Wavelength are provided:
- Reservation mode: Customers can pre-plan the AWS Wavelength capacity they need to use
On-demand mode: Customers can dynamically configure the AWS Wavelength capacity to be used according to their own needs. - The pre-determined model can take advantage of economies of scale to reduce costs, while the on-demand model has excellent flexibility and can also lower costs overall.
Wide range of application fields
AWS Wavelength supports a wide range of application areas, such as: edge machine learning inference, driverless technology, smart cities, gaming, communication, Internet of Things, streaming media, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality.