Driving Telecom Transformation with Telco GitOps and AI Driven Automation
Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:31:35 -0000
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Dell Technologies Enables CSPs to Accelerate Networks Automation
In the rapidly evolving telecommunications landscape, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are embracing cloud-native architectures to deliver both current and future services. Industry insights from Analysys Mason predict that by 2024, deployments of horizontal programmable telco clouds will surpass those of vertically integrated stacks. As CSPs scale their 5G and cloud-native deployments, management and automation of these platforms become critical.
Challenges of Traditional GitOps in Telco Environments
While the IT industry has benefited from automation practices like GitOps, applying these practices to CSP environments requires significant enhancements. The key challenges CSPs encounter when deploying these technologies in brown-field networks include:
- Non- declarative Abstraction: GitOps controllers directly reference tools, making solutions opinionated and hard to scale.
- Manifest Rendering: Current tools render manifests to match CSP environments, risking drift between declared and deployed states.
- Telco-Specific Needs: GitOps tools must adapt to CSP requirements, supporting modularity and decoupling between application and infrastructure.
- Environment Heterogeneity: Managing a fleet of legacy and new infrastructure necessitates seamless integration.
- Distributed Deployment Patterns: GitOps must align with data center, edge, and RAN deployment patterns.
- Standards and Compliance: Strict adherence to telecom standards and security regulations is essential.
GitOps is not same as Telco Automation
Telco GitOps extends beyond traditional IT GitOps by focusing on Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and CT (Continuous testing). These elements are crucial for automation in telecommunications.
Telco automation needs a consistent way to streamline the telco cloud from design time to run time to deliver services in a programmable and automated manner. Such telco GitOps automation should support simple integration, easy LCM (Life cycle management), secure and aligned with use case and workload requirements. CSPs are collaborating with numerous organizations, especially TMforum to accelerate automation towards level-4 (full-service orchestration and automation) and level-5 (AI-driven automation). Despite these efforts, there remains an absence of definitive steps to implement these principles in large-scale networks.
Therefore, it is crucial that such a solution adheres to the following key characteristics:
- Decoupling: Separating infrastructure from applications to expose capabilities in a standardized manner.
- Open API: Ensuring all resources and workflows are accessible using Open APIs, aligned with telecom standards.
- Service Assurance: Adopting a cloud operating model to deliver service assurance in a closed-loop manner.
- Single Source of Truth: Maintaining all network artifacts in a single, immutable repository.
- Removing Silos: Standardizing automation toolchains to eliminate duplications.
Figure: Telco Cloud CI/CD framework
Adapting Telco GitOps with Network Automation
Implementing Telco GitOps involves leveraging principles of immutability, single source of truth, and declarative artifacts. Key capabilities of this futuristic Telco Cloud platform should support:
- Infrastructure Automation and LCM:
- Configurations as Code: Representing provisioning and life cycle management as code.
- Version Control: Aligning changes with change management processes.
- Separation: Modularizing resources and inventory.
- Automated Testing: Eliminating lengthy manual testing processes.
- Streamlined Automation: Deploying solutions from design to runtime.
- Security Automation: Integrating security procedures across the life cycle.
- Application Automation and LCM:
Telco Cloud platform should interwork with CSP Application Orchestration to enable the following capabilities through automation:
- Event-Driven Automation: Dynamically adjusting states based on observability.
- Compliance: Ensuring applications adhere to CSP policies and SLA/SLO.
- De-coupling: Separating resources from inventory.
- Validation: Pre-validating unique CSP requirements like Passthrough and DPDK.
- CI/CD Requirements:
- Modularity: Separating and interworking infrastructure and application automation domains.
- Compliance: Committing to promised outcomes (SLA/SLO).
- Openness: Flexibility to align with preferred tools.
- Test Automation: Incorporating automated testing as a standard outcome.
Accelerate telco GitOps using- Telecom infrastructure Blocks.
Dell Technologies, in collaboration with leading cloud partners including Red Hat, has developed a Telco Cloud platform that is thoroughly tested, validated, and automated to deliver telco GitOps. This platform is designed to help adopt zero-touch operations while consistently aligning to telecom standards and frameworks. Dell Technologies Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation flexibly transforms network operations towards programmable infrastructure, using consistent tooling and GitOps approaches.
Dell Telecom infrastructure blocks are fully aligned with principles of openness and modularity, enabling CSPs to integrate their preferred Ci/CD tools. Based on actual deployments, it has become apparent that specific tools are particularly relevant for CSPs. To support CSPs unique requirements to adopt Telco GitOps, our Telecom Infrastructure Blocks provide the following key capabilities:
- Consistent platform: Telecom infrastructure blocks deliver a consistent automated platform that can interwork with CSPs opinionated tools to deliver a fully automated network platform.
- Cloud native automation: Telecom infrastructure blocks come with unique orchestration capabilities provided by DTIAS (Dell Telecom infrastructure automation suite) which means that GitOps tools specifications are abstracted in a declarative manner, which is easy to deploy and integrate into any brown field environment.
- Future Proof towards AI driven Automation: Our solution is fully declarative, and policy-driven, which enables intent-driven orchestration paving the way towards AI-driven automation.
- Data-driven architecture: The automation architecture is data-driven and distributed, so data can be tapped from the RAN, edge, and regional sites, enabling real-time use cases and data-driven operations. This means we can adopt data-driven AI GitOps in a phased approach.
Figure: Telco GitOps evolution phases
- Single pane for Automation: An Integrated orchestration system delivers automation outcomes using an engineered systems approach along with telco-centric lab and validation services, ensuring a GitOps-ready solution that is ready to be deployed at a telco scale.
Figure: Telco GitOps using telecom infrastructure blocks
Dell Technologies has developed Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation and Telecom Infrastructure Blocks to accelerate telco cloud transformation. This engineered and factory-integrated system delivers a consistent platform that is ready to deliver telco GitOps use cases. It is fully aligned with telecom architectures and offers customers the support they need to accelerate their automation journey.
Visit the Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation to learn more about our solution.