eSIM Management in the Cloud
The growth of the eSIM ecosystem together with the emergence of container technology has led to an increased use of cloud providers for the hosting of eSIM management solutions. In the traditional on-premises model, infrastructure, platforms, and applications are built on top of each other. With cloud services, however, you can choose how much of the traditional process you would like to manage yourself and what to purchase from the cloud provider.
The benefits are substantial. Instead of buying infrastructure up front, cloud services like IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) allow you to spread the spending over time and save expenses concerning hardware maintenance. Computing resources are provisioned on demand and can easily be scaled as needed. This means you can not only increase service consumption but also decrease it when resources are no longer necessary.
When the solution is hosted on cloud, both the eSIM service provider and the Cloud provider need to be SAS-SM certified for the activities within scope of SAS-SM that they are responsible for.
In principle, two certification options are available for the cloud provider:
Option1: non-independent SAS-SM Certification
The cloud provider is seeking to be included within the scope of the eSIM service provider’s certification as a subcontractor (the eSIM service provider is ultimately responsible for compliance with the SAS-SM requirements by its subcontractor).
Option 2: independent SAS-SM Certification
The cloud provider chooses to acquire independent SAS-SM certification of its Cloud services and data centres.
Some cloud providers have been certified over the last couple of years with the non-independent option as subcontractors. Over the last 20 months two of the global cloud hyperscalers have chosen to complete independent SAS-SM certification, first Microsoft Azure followed by Amazon Web Services. As of today, both have certified multiple locations in Europe and the United States.
We see this development, which has been on the horizon for some time, as a game changer in the industry. It is why we decided from the beginning to build solutions that run in any cloud. It allows companies to fully focus on the creation of innovative eSIM based connectivity services that can be easily scaled and comply from the beginning with telco grade reliability requirements.
We wanted to make sure our product is easier to use than the ones available on the market. What ease of use entails from our point of view is of course ease of setup, configuration and deployment. That is the reason why we decided to implement a microservices based architecture back in 2015, with the target to develop eSIM Subscription Management software completely portable between different cloud infrastructure providers.
As a consequence our software is automatically deployable in form of Docker containers in Kubernetes cluster with the help of Helm charts. Service scalability, availability and maintainability is achieved thanks to tools provided by Kubernetes. Postgres, Prometheus, ELK stack, and other state-of-the-art software. Furthermore, by relying exclusively on open source technologies, we have significantly reduced upfront investments as well as operational costs for the solution.
Now, with several public cloud service providers certifying their data center services in accordance with the GSMA SAS-SM standard in an increasing amount of locations around the world, the cloud-native architecture starts to unfold its obvious benefits:
- rapid setup of a customer-own PoC or trial system, allowing the customer not only to get familiar with Subscription Manager functionality but try it out in connection with his own business processes and back-end systems
- quick and easy setup of an instance in a new location, shortening time-to-market for a new service introduction
- multi-site, hybrid (private/public cloud), geo-redundant and other custom configurations can be build by achelos or customer DevOps teams without the need to change even one line of code
If you want to build an eSIM management service that is under your complete control, get in touch with us and let's talk how we can enable your service.