Nokia Building a Telecom Network: By Delivering Softwares Using Kubernetes

Nokia was the first name in mobile phones when they were becoming ubiquitous in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But by 2014, the company had sold off its mobile device division and was focusing its core business not on the handhelds used for calls, but on the networks.

Today, Nokia is building telecom networks end-to-end from antennas to switching and routing equipment serving operators in more than 120 countries. As telecom vendors, they have to deliver software to several telecom operators and put the software into their infrastructure, and each of the operators have a bit different infrastructure. There are operators who are running on bare metal. There are operators who are running on virtual machines. There are operators who are running on VMware Cloud and OpenStack Cloud. So to run the same product on all of these different infrastructures without changing the product itself.

Looking for a way to allow its teams to build products with infrastructure-agnostic behavior, the company decided to embrace containerization, Kubernetes, and other cloud native technologies, a move that is being made across the telecom industry. Since early 2018, when people are picking up their phones and making a call on Nokia networks, they are creating containers in the background with Kubernetes. Now, all the products are doing some kind of re-architecture work, and they’re moving to Kubernetes.

Challenges they faced:-

Nokia’s core business is building telecom networks end-to-end; its main products are related to the infrastructure, such as antennas, switching equipment, and routing equipment. As telecom vendors, they have to deliver software to several telecom operators and put the software into their infrastructure and each of the operators have a bit different infrastructure. There are operators who are running on bare metal. There are operators who are running on virtual machines. There are operators who are running on VMwareCloud and OpenStack Cloud. So to run the same product on all of these different infrastructures without changing the product itself was quite challenging.

Solved the challenge using Kubernetes:-

The company decided that moving to cloud native technologies would allow teams to have infrastructure-agnostic behavior in their products. Teams at Nokia began experimenting with Kubernetes in pre-1.0 versions. The simplicity of the label-based scheduling of Kubernetes was a sign that this architecture will scale, will be stable, and will be good for our purposes. The first Kubernetes-based product, the Nokia telephony Application Server, went live in early 2018. “Now, all the products are doing some kind of re-architecture work, and they’re moving to Kubernetes.

Impact of Kubernetes on Nokia:-

Kubernetes has enabled Nokia’s foray into 5G. When you develop something that is part of the operator’s infrastructure, you have to develop it for the future, so Kubernetes and containers are the forward-looking technologies. The teams using Kubernetes are already seeing clear benefits. By separating the infrastructure and the application layer, they have got less dependencies in the system, which means that it’s easier to implement features in the application layer. And because teams can test the exact same binary artifact independently of the target execution environment, so one can find more errors in early phases of the testing, and we do not need to run the same tests on different target environments like VMware, OpenStack, or bare metals. As a result, they started saving several hundred hours in every release.

A Container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings.

If you are already using containers in your business or if you intend to do so soon, I’m sure you already know it. But anyway, let’s give a quick reminder of what Kubernetes is.

*What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (K8S) is defined as an open-source system for the automation of deployments, scaling, and management of containerized applications.This container orchestrator was initially designed by Google, who later donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it’s written in Go. It can be deployed in multiple cloud or bare-metal environments and supports multiple container runtimes (docker, rkt, cri-o or frakti).

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