A Deep Dive into CI/CD Pipelines Tailored for Telecom: Orchestrating Cloud-Native 5G Services with DevOps and Infrastructure Automation

Abstract

The deployment of 5G services is challenging since it entails deploying multiple Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) across a diverse set of compute and networking infrastructure. This deployment typically relies on Command Line Interface (CLI) automation tooling, which leads to an error-prone process that is difficult to control and maintain. The problem is exacerbated in multi-site deployments where orchestration and synchronization between sites become necessary. Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment (CD) methodologies from the software world can bring significant benefits to telecom, easing the deployment of 5G services while maintaining quality and control. These problems and solutions are rooted in practical experience in deploying and managing 5G services for private networks. A workflow enabling telecom CI/CD is presented, along with a proof of concept developed in this context to illustrate the approach. This proof of concept deploys the Open 5G core based on the CORD project onto on-premise OpenStack infrastructure. The holistic approach followed in designing this solution makes it extensible to other services, infrastructures, and cloud platforms.

The Open architecture developed by the O-RAN Alliance is moving cellular networks toward disaggregated, softwarized, programmable intelligent systems. This evolution brings a different networking paradigm with new opportunities, but also important challenges. By breaking radio, transport, and core functionalities into individual parallel processes, disaggregation and softwarization can break the current vendor lock-in and open the cellular ecosystem to a larger number of players, facilitating innovation in the cellular market . Such innovation could encompass the development of new RAN functionalities, the use of advanced AI-based analytics to assess, predict, and improve the performance of the system, and the creation of new applications and services that use network telemetry. By exposing key parameters to this programmatic intelligence, cellular systems can be made more efficient, adaptable, and less costly, while exposing media at the most abstract level to facilitate a higher level of automation, synchronization, and coordination with the edge and the cloud. This vision of programmable intelligence can be achieved only if the necessary analogy with the computer ecosystem is implemented.