Aussie Broadband is six months into building a cloud platform for its own internal use that will replace existing compute and containerisation platforms and help it shrink its data centre footprint.
Aussie Broadband’s Ben O’Shea.
Transformation and cloud platform general manager Ben O’Shea described the project at Cisco Live in Melbourne earlier this month as “one platform to rule them all”.
“As with any company that’s grown rapidly, organically and through acquisition, we’ve got a very diverse and complex technical landscape, and the overheads that come with managing those are not sustainable,” O’Shea said.
“We’re really looking to build a next-generation computing platform … to consolidate all of those legacy platforms and workloads onto, get the operational efficiency that comes along with that, but also provide our engineering teams with modern, cloud-like capabilities so they can bring the next generation of containerisation through to the applications that service our customers.”
Speaking to iTnews, O’Shea said the new cloud platform would initially offer “infrastructure- and container-as-a-service capabilities for the business, to support our next phase of growth”, before branching out.
“It is envisaged that over time, higher level platform services such as DBaaS, API gateway, integration bus, etc will also be delivered and offered in an easily consumable fashion to the business.”
The project has been running for about six months, covering what O’Shea said was “an extensive technology evaluation and vendor selection process.”
The tech stack includes contributions from Cisco, NetApp, Pure Storage and SuSE.
“We’re using Cisco Nexus kit to build our VXLAN EVPN [Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible LAN] data centre network,” O’Shea told iTnews.
“Cisco is also supplying the compute that powers the cloud platform.
“Physical storage is delivered both locally out of the Cisco UCS [unified computing system] boxes and for fabric-attached [storage] we are leveraging NetApp AFFs [all-flash fabric-attached storage]. All of this is aggregated and protected using the [Pure Storage-owned] Portworx software-defined storage software platform.
“Finally, we’ve partnered with SuSE to supply the cloud operating system software stack, using Rancher RKE2 for containers, Harvester for IaaS VMs and NeuVector for security and observability.”
Aussie Broadband is targeting the end of FY25 – mid-2025 calendar year – to have its first production workloads migrated across and operating on the new cloud platform.
“The platform will continue to evolve as we identify and plan additional migration candidates,” he said.
As the new cloud platform becomes the internal default for hosting workloads and applications, the company intends to retire some of its existing platforms.
“We are looking to retire our legacy corporate virtualisation platform and the compute and storage hardware platforms underpinning it,” O’Shea said.
“Aside from that, our existing Docker and Kubernetes platforms will also be retired.”
He added that “at completion, this should see a significant reduction in technology debt for the organisation as well as consolidation of data centre space.”
Beyond replacing these systems, O’Shea is also looking at the platform host Aussie Broadband’s “ISP Services Platform (DHCP, RADIUS, DNS, etc) and NetSIP technology stack.”
At Cisco Live, O’Shea said that aside from modernisation and simplification, the new platform is intended to support Aussie Broadband’s continued growth and scale ambitions.
“Within the telecommunications industry, the biggest challenge that we have is scale,” he said.
“We’ve got a whole bunch of different performance characteristics, particularly in our voice platforms [where] we need real-time performance through those platforms, and to do that at scale is challenging.
“We also need to be able to respond to the needs of the business. Being able to deploy things rapidly through zero-touch provisioning and automation is one of the key outcomes we’re looking to deliver from the platform.”
Real-time service promise of AI
Separately at Cisco Live, O’Shea foreshadowed interest from Aussie Broadband in artificial intelligence technology to potentially help customers in future to self-service tweaks to their broadband services in circumstances where performance may be temporarily degraded.
“I think with AI, there’s a real opportunity [with] the information that’s available through [home] wi-fi meshes and routers, to be able to leverage AI to take all that data and provide insights around how [the customer’s] connected experience is at that moment.
“For someone like my parents, to be able to ask a question like why is Netflix running slow, and have AI analyse the information that all those sensors are providing and respond with, ‘Hey, there’s a bit of congestion on the network at the moment. Would you like us to prioritise that traffic for you?’ and it does [that action automatically], I think that’s really powerful.”