We are entering a world in which 5G will soon become mainstream. Networks have been increasingly driven by software, due to which the telecom sector is emerging as a pioneer with greater efficiency and reliability. But telecom operators have built their ecosystems around the deployment and operations, keeping traditional waterfall release cycles as their foundation. Since there are a lot of silos, turning the functions into a single seamless entity is challenging.
But now that new technologies such as 5G bring their own set of evolving customer demands, the telecommunication sector faces pressure to create and roll out features quickly. It makes the implementation of continuous monitoring a necessary measure. Not to mention, continuous testing for telcos has turned out to be a crucial step to staying on par with current trends.
It is safe to say that 5G is no longer in its beginning stages. With the latest technology completely rolling out, CSPs must navigate digital transformation reliably and securely. Implementation of CI/CD is the way to go. This post will look at the impact of CI/CD on telecommunication operations as we enter the world of 5G in detail. Let us dive right in.
The Importance of Continuous Testing for The Digital Value Chain of The Telecom Industry
5G is an initiative by telecoms to contribute to a strongly connected society. CI/CD in the telecom sector caters to software life cycle automation. It’s a great way to add more network capabilities and choose the frequency and intensity of changes without complicating things. CI/CD also delivers better value to customers with low to no risks.
When working with 5G, telecom operators should keep the differences with previous generations in mind. It is vital to note that if a telecom company plans to deploy 5G over a year, the nature of the software will be evolutionary and rapidly maturing. Testing teams might have to update use cases every 4-5 weeks or less. The Quality Assurance teams should keep the testing process incremental and continuous in an Agile framework.
Impact of CI/CD On Different Telecom Operations
Implementing CI/CD indicates faster software development, delivery, testing, acceptance, and operationality than in a traditional environment. This method calls for continuous validation testing to accompany the software’s constant deployment and delivery. But are the same time, network operators should ensure that a continuously iterating environment shouldn’t hurt data security. One way is by increasing transparency in policies and digital configurations. Another way is by implementing a cross-functional collaboration and taking shared responsibility for a network’s resilience, stability, and security.
As CSPs prepare for the 5G revolution, there are some organizational challenges like silos and vagueness in KPIs and development metrics such as team velocity. But when you start considering CI/CD as a crucial stepping stone towards betterment, CSPs can easily optimize the 5G core.
Every network operator needs to keep their context and objectives in mind while deciding how much they should rely on themselves and their vendors. Besides the continuous implementation of CI/CD and the adoption of agile working ways, there has to be a competent development strategy in place that carries out organizational mapping and defines roles for people associated with the organization. Companies can put well-defined policies in place to govern the deployment and delivery of software. Since CI/CD is here to stay for the long haul, telecom service providers should revolve their digital transformation strategy around this capability.
Additional Benefits of CI/CD For The Telecom Industry
Thanks to zero-touch testing and deployment, CI/CD leads to increased operational efficiency. It leads to better management of increased traffic and new services. Not to mention, operations and engineering teams can avail a more streamlined work environment.
Since CI/CD facilitates the mitigation of risks that come with manual work, the security becomes tighter. Instead of massive upgrade projects, teams can work with frequent minor updates that are gradual in their nature. Greater service agility comes with ready-to-activate capabilities, service diversity, and shorter market-time.
Implementing CI/ CD In The Telecom Sector
The implementation of CI/CD starts by automating manual procedures. The respective teams can then work on complementing these initial steps with software validation and upgrades in staging environments. Soon, the production follows.
A CI/CD approach has three general stages. Teams start off by evaluating crucial processes such as test management, environmental data refresh, and release management. After that comes the optimization of time-consuming measures, including simplifying manual intervention and shortening the waiting time into smaller, more manageable steps. The second stage is to select a user-friendly and reliable tool to bring it all under a single umbrella. Start with automation and build a CI/CD pipeline to streamline all processes in one CI/CD loop.
Conclusion
Rolling new features out for legacy applications can be challenging. Even configuration changes with new releases can lead to problems in making frequent system updates due to their rapidly evolving nature. The correct way to go is to understand a landscape followed by implementing an automated CI/CD approach for managing configuration changes and customizations.
You can complement initial steps such as automated software delivery and automating tests in labs with software validation and upgrades before moving into production. Although you can have some points for maintaining manual intervention to stay in control while implementing automated CI/CD pipelines in the telecom sector.
Telecommunication providers can’t implement complete CI/CD overnight. But step-wise evolution from entirely traditional approaches should be the target. Whether it is continuous soak and stress testing or regression and unit testing automation of newly-created code, the best telco testing solutions can turn out to be game changers for the telecom sector.