How telcos can adopt DevOps practices
Software companies have achieved astounding levels of success with DevOps. The telcos are impressed, and are aiming to do the same.
The advent of 5G has created a trend among telcos (Telecommunication Companies) to adopt DevOps.
Unlike previous generation telco applications which were either hardware appliances or running on virtual machines, the 5G systems are cloud-native, containerized applications meant to run on Kubernetes.
Fueled by this technology evolution, the telcos are aiming to transform into digital communication platforms at a whole new level.
Cloud and DevOps are going to be at the center of this transformation.
DevOps is nothing new to software companies. They have been practicing DevOps for more than a decade, and are reaping huge benefits.
DevOps has enabled SaaS businesses to quickly and incrementally build and ship digital products to the market. These companies have become impressively capable of quickly responding and adapting to the market dynamics. Their operation model has enabled them to scale up to unprecedented levels.
Telcos may also follow these software companies to adopt DevOps. But, there is a notable difference between a telco and a software company.
The software companies practicing DevOps own the entire software development lifecycle. The development teams write code and build applications. Then, the operations teams run those applications in the cloud. Both teams work in harmony to complete the DevOps loop.
On the other hand, telcos are operating in a different model.
Telco Operations Model
Telecom applications are built by a handful of big specialized telecom vendors.
These vendors supply the applications and take care of the total lifecycle of the application as well. The telcos are so dependent on this model that these big vendors are in control of the entire operations of the telecom networks and systems. Not only that, these vendors have lots of influence to define how the telecom industry evolves.
The telcos have very few opportunities for innovation within this operations model.
It also does not foster telcos to exploit the promising opportunities in 5G.
How DevOps can help
Adopting DevOps practices can help telcos to overcome this challenge and build a flexible, scalable, and sustainable operations model.
Flexible
While the current telco market is dominated by a few big vendors, there is a bunch of ambitious small-scale vendors popping up. They can help telcos develop innovative solutions on top of 5G.
Adopting DevOps will help telcos quickly and easily onboard software applications from these new suppliers into the telco ecosystem. It can create abundant opportunities for innovation for telcos.
Scalable
The present telco operations model is dominated by manual procedures. They are hard and costly to scale.
Telcos can adopt DevOps and cloud-native technologies to transform towards a fully automated operations model.
Automation will enable telcos to scale up to any level without increasing the operational overhead.
Sustainable
The telco operational model has been slowly evolving over several decades reactively adapting new technologies.
But, to stay sustainable over the next decade the telcos must be proactive and agile.
A DevOps culture built with a solid feedback mechanism can help telcos continuously improve the systems to adapt to changing markets in a customer-centric approach.
How to adopt DevOps - The telco DevOps lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle provides the ground for building DevOps practices.
The telco DevOps lifecycle involves both the vendors and the telco. The vendors are responsible for developing the applications and the telco has full control to deploy and operate those applications in either on-premise data centers or the public cloud.
The vendors and the telcos collaborate to resolve any problems that arise during the operations phase.
Plan
In the planning phase, the vendor decides the functions and features to implement in the next iteration.
The vendor also considers the problems and concerns received from the telco as feedback. Both parties collaboratively agree on what will be included for development in the next iteration.
Build
In the build phase, the vendors write code and build the application.
Test (vendor)
This is the internal testing vendor does before releasing an application to the telco.
Release
The vendor makes the new release available to the telco with updated documentation.
As containerization is going to be universally adopted for 5G telco applications, the vendor can push the new container images to a container registry that is accessible to the telco.
Deploy
The telco deploys the new release in a test environment. The deployment workflows must be automated so that the telco can deploy the application multiple times with ease for iterative testing.
Telecom applications have a large set of configurable parameters. These configurations were traditionally done via CLI or GUI terminals. The 5G applications must implement a mechanism to automate these configurations so that the deployment workflows can take care of that part as well.
Test (telco)
In this testing phase, the operations team at the telco test the application to ensure that it delivers the inteded services to the end users.
Most telcos still rely on manual testing but automation can make the DevOps cycle more efficient.
If tests are passing the application is deployed to the production environment.
Operate
The telco operations team monitors the application metrics and logs, and takes corrective actions to rectify faults.
The vendor must support for bug fixes, security fixes, etc., in the operations phase.
DevOps and Telco Org Structure
The current organizational structure in telcos is not optimal for efficient adoption of DevOps. So, the telcos must consider a reorgnization.
Since there is not universal method for implementing DevOps, the optimum organizations structure will be context dependent.
Let’s meet again in a future post to discuss some good and bad organizational structures for telcos to adopt DevOps.