Technological innovation has been changing our lifestyle and how we do business. Therefore, companies must make changes to respond quickly and efficiently to the challenges of accelerated technological development. But how can communications service providers (CSPs) meet this great challenge? First, let’s explore CI/CD and its advantages.
The big challenge
The advent of 5G in the cloud, based on microservices, promotes the offering of new products and services of greater complexity, which, in turn, increases the software requirements to not only support them but also improve product launch cycles from months to weeks.
This offer is a business opportunity for CSPs, but to take advantage of these benefits requires digital transformation and, with it, the automation of development processes. At this point, CI/CD becomes a critical tool to manage the services’ greater diversity and complexity.
But what is CI/CD? A brief description
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery-Deployment (CI/CD) involves all software development and deployment stages. Therefore, it is an agile method to automate and monitor the application lifecycle, going through design, coding, testing, integration, delivery, validation, and distribution or deployment of these applications.
CI refers to Continuous integration, which is focused on streamlining code changes, allowing developers to make changes and checks in an automated and reliable way, creating, testing, and packing applications quickly, contributing to software improvement.
CD is Distribution or Continuous Deployment; these concepts refer to the automation of later stages in the application lifecycle and differ in scope.
Continuous distribution involves the phases where code changes are automatically tested and uploaded to a repository such as GitHub. The operations team must then manually deploy them to the production environment.
Continuous deployment is a step further, where changes are automatically released to production, avoiding manual processes by the operation, for CSPs updates are applied in phases across production environments or network segments.
What about its benefits?
As you can imagine, when a CSP moves from a waterfall methodology for its software development to an agile method such as CI/CD, it drastically decreases programming and application release cycles from years or months to weeks or even days.
In addition:
• Efficiency is increased by automating tests (unit, regression, stress, functional and non-functional) and application deployments. Managing new services and traffic growth efficiently.
• Risk is reduced by limiting manual processes, enabling the delivery of higher-quality software to the end user. Supporting gradual and frequent upgrades.
• Service agility as the operator will be ready to deal with the diversity and complexity of new products and services. There will be a decrease in the TTM (Time to Market) for these new products and services.
Implementing CI/CD in communications service providers is an evolutionary process, implementing it gradually, starting with the automation of current activities and taking advantage of ETSI NFV management capabilities.
Over time and as automated CI/CD flows increase, the advantages will become more evident, facilitating developments based on cloud-native architectures and underlying technologies and efficient real-time microservice updates.
Manual processes will be a thing of the past, and CSPs will be able to respond more quickly and efficiently to the challenges posed by changes in telecommunications technology.
In your opinion, what are the most effective CI/CD tools?
Written by: Andrea Catalina Gutiérrez Galeano, Senior Consultant BPS