- AWS' Matt Rehder told Fierce its fiber network is largely autonomous
- Humans decide how the system should run and make physical repairs but otherwise the network runs itself
- AWS uses its own network and devices to make automation easy - a luxury telcos don't have
One of the largest fiber networks in the world runs pretty much entirely autonomously. In this network, there are no Network Operations Centers (NOCs) full of IT staff monitoring and troubleshooting problems. There’s just software quietly running the show, looping in a human only when there’s a hands-on repair that needs to be made.
For telecom operators, this probably sounds like something out of a fantasy novel. But for AWS it’s reality.
“Today our network does run itself in the sense of there’s definitely no human making decisions day-to-day like the running of the network – it just runs,” Matt Rehder, AWS’ VP of Core Networking, told Fierce.
Rehder said automated systems on its network independently handle 97% to 98% of events. Throw AI agents into the mix and humans will soon only be needed “in the loop” for physical work.
Sure, Rehder said there are many humans who make decisions about how the network should behave and function. He added he doesn’t see that changing even with AI – the technology is more an accelerating tool than a replacement for humans on that front. But these humans aren’t necessarily in the day-to-day decision-making loop.
Hence, autonomy.
How AWS got here
AWS isn’t the only one living the autonomous network life. Google Cloud told Fierce last year it expected to achieve full autonomy on its fiber backbone network by the end of 2025. Rehder said he’s aware of what Google is doing and for the most part “they operate a similar way” to how AWS is doing things.
So, how did it get here? Rehder said AWS has been focused on automating its network for years – well before AI was ever on the scene.
“This is not AI-related for us. AI is helping us but we’ve been doing this probably 10-plus years,” he said. “We’ve always kind of designed to that expectation that there’s no operator.”
Key to its success has been AWS’ decision to develop its own network devices and software, he added.
“If you’re using vendor systems, the APIs available to interact with the devices and automate them are…it’s hard,” he said. “If you’re in a multi-vendor setup, then you’re trying to manage, ‘how does my automation work with Vendor A, Vendor B and Vendor C?' and it only adds to the complexity.”
This, of course, is exactly what telcos are up against with their sprawling multi-vendor networks. Hence, their slow progress along the path to autonomy.
Rehder acknowledged telcos aren’t in an easy position. “It’s hard to change your philosophy if you’re built like the telcos,” he said. But for AWS, it wouldn’t work any other way.
“The scale of our network – it would be terrifying to try to think of how you would have humans in the loop,” he concluded.