Microsoft announces the general availability of Azure Operator Nexus

Microsoft Azure Operator Nexus, which the company previewed in February, has now reached generally availablity. The offering,  which the company bills as a carrier-grade hybrid platform, is intended to help reduce total cost of ownership, support efficiency with advanced AI and automation, and support distributed software networks.

For customers, one of the most important aspects of Microsoft’s announcement was a rundown of new features added since the MWC event. Network Fabric Automation allows operators to build and manage carrier-grade network fabric with Azure, implementing network policies and lifecycle management. Network Packet Broker, in turn, offers a way to capture, aggregate, and assess traffic to enhance network observability.

The Microsoft team also called out Azure Lockbox to control customer data access requests, a native integration with Monitor for observability, Operator Service Manager to simplify management, and placement control for network functions. On-prem customers can also tap into enhanced Azure Kubernetes Service, with extensions to automate the creation of containers. Going forward, Microsoft plans to add new containerized and virtualized network functions support, plus support for RAN, Transport, Packet Core, and Enterprise services, together with expanded AIOps, and a “smaller form factor deployment” of Operator Nexus.

So far, AT&T has begun deploying Network Functions workloads with the offering, and Nokia carried out a 5G Standalone call with its cloud-native network functions running on Operator Nexus.

“Operator Nexus GA is an important milestone in our journey with Microsoft and ecosystem collaborators on Telco Grade cloud for Mobility 5G Core. We are excited to see our vision of Telco grade cloud powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies ...