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A horizontal purpose-built cloud, such as clouds developed by companies like Ericsson and Nokia, is designed and optimized for the requirements of a particular industry or use case. They often include specialized features, protocols, and functionalities optimized for specific workloads, performance requirements, and regulatory compliance.
In contrast, a more open horizontal build cloud-based around Kubernetes is designed to provide a flexible and standardized platform for running various workloads. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that enables the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications in a distributed environment. It offers a uniform infrastructure abstraction and a rich ecosystem of tools and services.
There are two ways to tackle this issue, and both have different outcomes:
External factors such as openness vision, budget constraints, and technical aspirations primarily influence selecting a CaaS platform or vendor when constructing a Horizontal CaaS or Cloud environment. These requirements, in turn, shape the criteria for hardware selection, ensuring alignment between the chosen CaaS platform and the underlying infrastructure.
Building an Open CaaS platform comes with challenges, including the absence of NFV vendor certification and the need for fine-tuning workloads that are typically readily available in Vertical CaaS stacks. Overcoming these challenges requires a rigorous certification process and customized optimization efforts to ensure compatibility and performance within the Open CaaS environment.
Specific optimizations for the CaaS platform include:
Some example questions we ask while designing: