Open telecom cloud in practice

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How to get started


Anyone who can not yet figure out whether the monthly flood of orders or customer spending is at the beginning of the month is ideal for public-cloud offers. Deutsche Telekom's offer is aimed in particular at those users whose business is subject to high fluctuations. The Open Telecom Cloud is one of the largest public cloud offerings in Europe based on OpenStack and offers various advantages. One of them is freedom. Anyone who already takes computing, storage or network resources from a cloud can easily move. To this end, Telekom offers the Cloud Container Engine (CCE), which also allows complex applications to be moved. This works with up to 500 clusters of virtual machines, each with a maximum of 15 computer nodes, which migrate from Amazon Web Services to the Telekom Cloud, or vice versa. The payment model also allows for freedoms: If necessary, pay-per-use procedures are charged to the hour exactly. However, if you bind contractually for a certain time, you get discounts.


Storage: Block Storage or Object Storage


Access to the Open Telecom Cloud is via a self-service portal or via programmable interfaces (APIs). Access rights can be assigned via firewalls and security groups. The underlying network of the Open Telecom Cloud is software-defined, which simplifies administration. Via IP-VPN you can set up a secure tunnel connection to your own IT resources.


An Elastic Load Balancer and the Auto Scaling Service provide the necessary flexibility: The resources can be automatically adapted based on predefined parameters, for example after certain times of day or in the case of sudden load peaks. The computing services of the Open Telekom Cloud essentially consist of three components: vCPUs, RAM and various operating systems (Oracle Linux, SUSE, Windows, etc.). In addition to preconfigured images, the Telekom also offers the possibility to store your own images. Computing servers are available from one to 32 vCPUs, memory from one to 128 GB of RAM. This results in 28 different combinations for different purposes, called Flavors. For users with extremely high demand, there are high-performance flavors. The renowned research center CERN already uses this option for especially high-resolution particle physics applications.


Block Storage is available with up to 10 32Tbyte volume service disks per server. Block storage is available as SATA, SAS or SSD, depending on the I / O requirement. An optional volume backup service allows for incremental storage and fast recovery of data. Alternatively, the Telekom Cloud also offers Object Storage. This variant is slower, but it is significantly cheaper and is therefore ideal for archiving.


On average, according to Telekom, around 40 new business customers per month are currently opting for services from the Open Telecom Cloud, with the trend rising. To meet growing demand, the company has announced plans to more than double the capacity of the highly secure data center in Saxony-Anhalt over the next two years.