Continuous Deployments at the Speed of 5G with FluxCD
Learn how Orange, a global telecommunications operator, integrated 5G SA network services into a Kubernetes cloud-native infrastructure using GitOps and FluxCD. Discover the benefits of automating deployments and managing Kubernetes resources at scale.
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.
Automating Deployments with GitOps & FluxCD
Implementing 5G globally, where each country will need deployments, with customizations related to country specificities and commercial offers was one of the real-life examples of how GitOps and FluxCD were used. The team turned to GitOps because they “saw some promising opportunities: the full usage of Git leveraging development good practices, declarative models, the pull model, continuous reconciliation, and lastly, the security benefits. The ultimate benefit that convinced us though, was the time savings across all deployments, whether it is in a development or production environment.”
They turned to Flux CD, a CNCF project created by Weaveworks, to manage their Kubernetes resources and to automate deployments. Flux CD features such as variable substitution, Helm value multiple overloading, and merged repos made it really useful in homogeneously deploying applications.
The blog goes on to explain how the team integrated 5G Stand Alone (SA) network services into a Kubernetes cloud-native infrastructure and adopted GitOps-based deployments using FluxCD.
Read the blog in its entirety here.
Automated Cloud-Native Infrastructure for the Edge & 5G with Weave GitOps
GitOps has emerged as the most effective way to manage and scale Kubernetes for telcos. As the creators of GitOps and backed by some of the leading telcos such as Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, and Orange, Weaveworks has two commercial solutions: Weave GitOps Assured and Weave GitOps Enterprise.
The Assured version offers enterprise-grade support for our GitOps open-source tools (FluxCD and Flagger). Weave GitOps Enterprise provides a full multi-cloud Kubernetes management solution and support options as well as enterprise GitOps features for accelerated and progressive delivery, add-ons management, policy, and fleets. Contact us for a demo today.
