Continuous Deployments at the Speed of 5G with FluxCD

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This blog is based on an end-user post on the CNCF blog by David Blaisonneau, Software/Cloud Expert for Network services at Orange, and Sylvain Desbureaux, DevSecOps engineer at Orange.

Orange is a global telecommunications operator providing services to end-users and enterprise market customers worldwide. It has over 70 million subscribers in Europe alone, with ~800Pb/month data traffic on mobile, 40K Sites, and x2.3 monthly traffic growth in 3 years.

In this article, two experienced cloud engineers (David Blaisonneau and Sylvain Desbureaux) explain how their team integrated 5G SA network services into a Kubernetes cloud-native infrastructure and adopted GitOps.

Rolling Out 5G Globally

For the past few years, the telecom industry has been all about 5G. The potential of 5G to benefit both consumers and businesses is virtually limitless. However, for network operators, this implies a significant amount of change that must occur rapidly. Despite the increased speed that 5G will provide, operators will need to deploy more infrastructure at the network's edge to meet customer expectations. Orange was no different with its ambitions to become the leading telecom reference for network agility, resilience, and performance.

Given the scale and magnitude of 5G, Orange has turned to Kubernetes and its ecosystem of cloud-native tooling. And GitOps became the operating model of choice.

“5G…is one of the first applications that really relies on things like Kubernetes and REST interfaces. With this you have the perfect opportunity to try out a different production model – and this different production model means you can start to work a little bit more like hyperscalers, using also frameworks like Kubernetes and GitOps.” - Michal Sewera of Deutsche Telekom.

Read this blog, “The world’s largest telcos are now embracing GitOps. Deutsche Telekom explains why,” to learn more about the role of GitOps in implementing 5G.

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