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Taking the cloud-native approach into the DNA of telecom application and infrastructure development

The cloud-native approach can shorten the time-to-market of new features and capabilities. Learn what is cloud-native’s role in Telecom.

Harri Salomaa / September 16, 2021

The telecommunications industry is in the midst of cloud transformation. It is speeding up the development of new cloud-native solutions and transforming legacy products. We work with Telecom Solution and Software Vendors to make the cloud-native network transformation a reality.

Cloud-native helps to increase operational efficiency in complex and multivendor software development and life-cycle management. Our entire telecom software engineering team is aligned with a cloud-native approach to enable elastic and resilient telecommunication infrastructure and scalable applications. The key benefit is accelerated and automated software deployment into the networks.

What does the true cloud-native approach mean?

We follow the cloud-native best practices and take full ownership of the infrastructure on which applications are running. In engineering terms, we run apps by hiding the "physical" Infra behind APIs, management, and orchestration software. This means that our customers can make more flexible vendor choices regarding compute, networking, and storage.

Telecommunication companies believe strongly in the benefits of microservices and container-based architectures, and so do we. With many of our clients, we develop and deploy self-healing applications. When each microservice is autonomous and independent, it is easy to monitor and upgrade a service without impacting others.

However, cloud-native is not just about microservices. Nor is cloud-native infrastructure the same as running apps in a container and using container orchestration, even though they provide several advantageous features needed in cloud-native infrastructure. In the cloud-native infrastructure, we can effectively manage both monolithic and microservices if need be.

 

What is cloud-native’s role in Telecom?

Cloud-native means that applications must be as platform-agnostic as possible and run on various designs. Almost all telecommunication service providers have a tailor-made infrastructure setup and configuration. The benefit of cloud-native goes way beyond new feature development, for example, in 5G. It also provides a way to make older technologies such as 4G/LTE more flexible in terms of hardware choices, and it increases capabilities for enterprise IoT mobility.

The cloud-native approach and best practices are not tightly connected with the underlying architecture and infrastructure. Therefore, they are also adaptable to all kinds of infrastructure configurations from on-prem to hybrid and private/public clouds.

In this hectic transformation, it is gratifying that we need not rewrite all existing software as a microservice. Instead, we can make it more hardware agnostic and run it on cloud-native infrastructure.

Some areas where our telecom software experts are active:

  • Infra and Applications development for the telecommunications industry: 5G, Data Centres, Apps, Network HW, SoC providers, Service Providers, OSS/BSS, and Open-Source Communities
  • Cloud DevOps: creating, configuring, and tuning various development environments, continuous integration, and delivery frameworks, toolchains as cloud services, integration services, and driving architecture for cloud-based R&D
  • Free and Open-source software such as OpenStack and Kubernetes, targeted for telecom cloud-native and network functions virtualisation infrastructures
  • Modular designs simplify the adoption
  • Network management and orchestration, including embedded operations & management, and Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP)
  • Cloud-native telecom technologies, such as CloudRAN/vRAN/O-RAN

The cloud-native delivery model is a critical enabler to gaining the best out of provisioning and managing telecom cloud resources. The right tools for the cloud-native delivery model allow an increased speed of new feature deployment – and accelerated time-to-market for getting new services out quickly.

Learn more about Telecom cloud-native development.

Harri Salomaa
Acting Managing Director, Tietoevry Create

Harri is an experienced sales and technology leader heading Product Development Business at Tietoevry. Previously in his career, at Hewlett-Packard, in the heart of Silicon Valley USA, he was responsible for Software R&D of Cloud Apps and Services, as well as Computer Vision and AI-driven analytics enabled in micro-service and container-based solution architectures. At Nokia Networks, in the USA, Germany, and Finland, he was responsible for Mobile Network Management Software R&D.

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