Taking part in building out the 5G ecosystem

[weaveworks]

If you’re in the telecoms business right now, it’s all about 5G, edge and IOT. The promise of the technology in terms of what it can offer consumers and businesses is virtually endless. But for the network operators, that means change. A lot of change – and it needs to happen fast. Because even with the boost in speed 5G will bring, it will require a lot more deployment at the edge of the network for operators to meet their customers’ expectations. That’s why we’ve just published a page on the benefits of GitOps for mobile networks.

Ultimately, this concerns an industry-wide shift to cloud-native infrastructure and modern operations. Not just the platforms on which customer applications run, but the underlying infrastructure that makes the network work. That’s because the 5G specification includes higher performance requirements for the latency and throughput of the core network. That means a lot of the hardware – physical and virtual – needs to be replaced. And much of it will shift to containers. 451 research explains:

 The concurrent process of global aggregate scale and rollout timing of 5G make telecom operators the cloud-native ecosystem's most important revenue generators and discerning customers. The unique characteristics of telecom (such as stateful applications, IPV6 support, SLAs) will require a degree of specialization for suppliers, and the need for skills augmentation, developer enablement and knowledge transfer will open ample service revenue paths.

These days, that means Kubernetes. Perfect for the kind of stateless (or minimal state) management workloads 5G involves, it automates so much of the work involved in deployment and management that the reduction in complexity and cost savings can be irresistible. Tune in to one of our recent podcast episode where Vuk Gojnic discusses Kubernetes and GitOps at Deutsche Telekom. 

In this video, Deutsche Telekom’s Till Stenzel talks to Weaveworks founder Alexis Richardson about GitOps - and why it’s such a good solution for telcos grappling with 5G.

The best way for a telco to implement GitOps is to talk to us about our key product, Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP). Combining the most innovative open-source components, along with GitOps, the gold standard for Kubernetes operating models, it allows centralizing every aspect of cloud-native development, operations, and lifecycle management without sacrificing the flexibility to adapt to unique organizational needs.

Once adopted, it means developers and operators will have the freedom to deploy workloads wherever they are needed, including at the edge of the network. Platform teams can empower developers through self service and focus on maintaining the new infrastructure. And crucially, legacy applications can be moved to the new infrastructure easily, without disrupting service.  

As the pioneers of GitOps and the leaders in its commercial delivery, we are well placed to help mobile networks reap its benefits. That’s why our investors include telecoms leaders such as Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson and Orange. To read more about what we can do for telcos and why it’s so important for them to take a look at GitOps, check out our new telco page.

View the full article