Can a Class 4 softswitch really run in the cloud?  This was a question I got at Mobile World Congress from a prospect because he was questioning whether a core telecom infrastructure node can actually run in the Cloud / AWS. The answer is yes, for sure - the networks have improved so much, and AWS has been running many mission critical, latency critical apps outside of telecom that a switch can certainly run in AWS. In fact, we have made the Dialogic NGN Softswitch and IMS MGCF (Dialogic ControlSwitch System) run on AWS and have already sold it and deployed it with customers.

The reason someone would want to do this is obvious –a next generation customer would want to be able to transfer IP phone calls to the PSTN, but would need to do it via AWS because their entire infrastructure is already on AWS.  The public cloud infrastructure offers enhancement of service agility (i.e. scaling up and down) and also offers transfer of CAPEX  to OPEX, which fits their business model better.

For Dialogic, it wasn’t that difficult to move the Dialogic ControlSwitch System to run in the Amazon Cloud.  The ControlSwitch already ran on COTS servers, and has a unique modular architecture that decomposes functionality into discrete building blocks / Virtual Machines (VMs).  The underlying cloud computing infrastructure is used only when it is needed, for example, when processing a call request. The ControlSwitch System draws the necessary resources on-demand (like compute servers or storage), perform a specific job, then relinquishes the resources after the job is done. The ControlSwitch can then elastically scale resources based on traffic load and service demand and can execute the off net call to the satisfaction of the voice subscribers.

In other words, yes, a Class 4 softswitch can run in a cloud.  If you want to read more, please read this whitepaper.