Anuket Launch Analyst Perspective: Caroline Chappell

### Overview Caroline Chappell, Research Director at Analysys Mason leading cloud infrastructure research, shares an analyst perspective on the launch of Anuket. She reflects on the decade-long journey of disaggregating network software and hardware—from running on virtualized commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers to common cloud platforms. Chappell views Anuket as a sign that the industry's approach to network cloud is maturing, bringing together learnings from earlier efforts to establish a standardized, collaborative cloud platform for telecommunications.

### Key Topics - **Evolution from OPNFV and CNTT**: OPNFV contributed to the understanding of telco cloud infrastructure stacks and automated pipelines for integration, deployment, and upgrades. However, operators initially struggled to relinquish control over proprietary stacks. CNTT emerged once operators realized that idiosyncratic telco cloud stacks were not competitive differentiators, but rather that innovation on top of a common platform creates differentiation. Anuket merges OPNFV's tooling, learnings, and certification capabilities with CNTT's vision for a single telco cloud reference model. - **Convergence of IT and Telco Cloud Needs**: While the industry previously expected telco clouds to become like enterprise IT clouds, IT workloads are instead becoming more distributed and real-time. Enterprise use cases increasingly demand access to hundreds or thousands of edge compute locations with compute-intensive, low-latency requirements similar to network functions. - **5G Radio Access Network (RAN) Virtualization**: The telecom industry faces an immediate imperative to deploy distributed, high-performance, and highly available network edge clouds to support 5G RAN virtualization. Successfully solving these challenges positions telcos to monetize and serve requirements for other industries.

### Technical Details - **Reference Architectures & Conformance**: Anuket targets an ecosystem of tested, ready-to-deploy cloud stack components and full stacks conforming to reference architectures, implementable across multiple technologies. - **Work Streams**: Anuket's core work streams focus on infrastructure automation, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, and hardware abstraction. - **Heterogeneous Hardware & Scheduling**: Future network and industrial edge clouds will move beyond x86-only architectures to support multiple chipsets and hardware acceleration technologies, making resource scheduling across heterogeneous hardware a primary technical challenge. - **Bridging Industry Bodies**: Anuket serves as an integration bridge between network-oriented bodies (GSMA) and cloud-native organizations (CNCF).

### Takeaways Chappell emphasizes that the momentum toward cloud-based networking is inexorable ("the NFV genie is not going to go back into the bottle"). To succeed, Anuket must remain a flexible, neutral point of reference and focal point for industry-wide collaboration, knowledge sharing, and certification across the telco cloud ecosystem.