Boosting Telecom Software Delivery with DevOps – Key Principles, Benefits and Challenges

For the telecom industry, reliable system performance, high customer satisfaction and short time to market are particularly important factors. By implementing a DevOps approach, telecom operators can meet customer expectations more easily as DevOps helps deliver new products and functionalities faster, while maintaining high service reliability and boosting productivity. These advantages are key across industries – Splunk’s State of Observability 2023 report found that 43% of the surveyed organizations didn’t feel fully confident that their teams would be able to meet application reliability and performance objectives. DevOps supports businesses in reaching these goals.

Read on to learn more about fundamental DevOps principles, its main benefits and key strategies for mitigating challenges to DevOps adoption in your organization.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a software engineering methodology that combines the work of software developers (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to forge one collaborative unit that delivers high-quality software in a fast, automated and iterative way. By incorporating various practices, tools and principles, DevOps enables organizations to foster innovation, increase efficiency and improve communication between software development and infrastructure operations. The need for DevOps is acknowledged by IT leaders globally. In the Upskilling IT 2023 Report from DevOps Institute, 41% of IT professionals said that DevOps/DevSecOps knowledge is a must-have process framework skill.

How does DevOps benefit telecom environments?

The benefits of applying DevOps to telecom software development processes include:

• Efficiency – DevOps improves the speed of delivery and reduces costs by streamlining workflows and optimizing resource use.
• Scalability and stability – The methodology ensures that systems can flexibly adapt to increased workloads and that they remain consistently reliable and available.
• Faster time to market – DevOps reduces lead times by limiting manual tasks, accelerating the delivery process and implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Improved collaboration – It encourages communication across traditionally siloed teams by creating a culture of transparency, mutual respect and shared responsibility.
• Security – The methodology offers enhanced practices by implementing a DevSecOps (development, security, operations) approach that integrates security throughout the entire software development life cycle (SDLC).
• Innovation – DevOps supports companies in adapting to emerging technologies through knowledge sharing, automation and fast deployment.

By combining DevOps practices with agile methodologies, modern CI/CD systems, observability and an Everything as Code approach, telecom operators can establish faster and more reliable system development processes.

What are the fundamental principles of DevOps, and how do they apply to telco environments?

Collaboration

DevOps fosters close cooperation between developers and the operations team by building trust and establishing more effective ways of communication. This can be a challenge because in many organizations, development and operations (or maintenance) teams work separately, and that separation generates silos. DevOps aims to eliminate these barriers and increase transparency between teams.

Automation & continuous deployment

Mobile operators are under pressure to deliver new features fast and constantly improve the quality of existing services. Increased automation helps reduce manual tasks and eliminate errors. Combined with continuous deployment practices, it enables development teams to release updates more frequently and address any incidents more quickly. DevOps also helps deliver and deploy new features in planned, predictable intervals, rather than in a Big Bang model.

Continuous improvement/integration

As part of DevOps, software development teams usually implement automated as well as end-to-end testing and build CI/CD pipelines to ensure security and enhance software quality. This approach is especially useful for complex telecom networks. For example, by applying end-to-end testing, you can make sure that the entire service functions correctly. If you only rely on unit testing, you risk missing some issues in a wider ecosystem of solutions and technologies.

Monitoring and customer feedback

DevOps emphasizes continuous monitoring of applications and infrastructure to proactively identify issues and gather feedback for improvement. In complex telecom environments, monitoring network performance, service availability and customer experience are critical for maintaining high service quality, identifying areas for optimization and ensuring system security.

What challenges might companies face during the transition to a DevOps culture?

When you integrate DevOps into your organization, the most common challenges your team might have to face include:

• Changing the mindset and organizational culture – Resistance to change can be a significant obstacle when it comes to implementing DevOps. Old habits, knowledge silos and a wide barrier between development and operations teams can make it difficult to foster collaboration and dynamic deployments.
• Costs, especially in the initial implementation stages – Depending on your current software delivery practices, the first steps into DevOps might require your team to invest time and money in automated testing, automation and observability tools as well as changes to existing infrastructure.
• Migrating from legacy solutions to cloud-native microservices – While a microservice-based architecture offers enhanced scalability and flexibility, it’s also more complicated than traditional monolithic applications and, as a result, requires teams to have deeper technical knowledge and the ability to manage complex dependencies and communication between services.
• Integrations with legacy platforms and vendor lock-in – Legacy and closed (“black-box”) solutions can make it more difficult to integrate DevOps tools with your systems. In these cases, you might have to put extra effort to create workarounds and customize the tools you’re using.
• Regulatory compliance and security concerns – Rapid iterations and frequent changes can make it challenging to maintain regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR) and ensure sensitive data security.

How to mitigate challenges to DevOps adoption?

Introduce DevOps gradually. Apply DevOps practices to small projects or teams, before you implement this approach in larger initiatives and across departments. Gradual adoption creates space for experimentation and process refinement, while your team learns the new policies, mindset, processes and tools.

Involve executives to promote DevOps. Support from top management is a key aspect of driving change across an organization. Company leaders advocating for this methodology can ensure that DevOps initiatives get the necessary resources and encourage wider organizational alignment needed for the changes to be successful.

Encourage cross-functional collaboration. It’s essential that development, operations, security and other teams involved in your software delivery process cooperate closely and communicate frequently. To break down organizational silos, make sure that all teams feel responsible for the solution they’re developing, are engaged in the process and work towards the same goal: to deliver a high-quality solution that meets all necessary requirements.

Invest in automation tools. Increased automation helps you streamline repetitive tasks (e.g., configuration management, provisioning, testing, deployments) so that your team can focus on improving and developing your products.

Implement a “compliance by design” approach. Privacy and security are crucial concerns for both telecom companies and their customers. By incorporating regulatory compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, encryption standards) in your software development from the start, you can mitigate risks and ensure system safety. This can include audits, security controls, access management and data privacy.

Evaluate your vendors and technologies. Aim to minimize vendor lock-in and foster interoperability between the different systems and tools you use. Adopting open-source frameworks and standards, as well as APIs and modular architectures helps increase flexibility and facilitate integrations.

Promote continuous improvement. Make sure your team regularly assesses and refines DevOps processes and tools. Implement feedback loops and measure KPIs to drive iterative improvements and optimize your solutions. A proactive approach to analyzing traffic and customer behavior can lead to recommendations to further develop popular features, increase user-friendliness and achieve optimal platform performance.

Create a risk management strategy. Security vulnerabilities and threats should be proactively identified and handled so that, ideally, your team can address potential incidents before they’re noticed by end users. A good risk management strategy involves robust monitoring, incident response and disaster recovery mechanisms.

Provide training and development opportunities. Foster a learning culture that promotes knowledge sharing and skill development so that your employees can gain and grow their skills in DevOps-related areas like agile methodologies, automation, cloud computing and containerization.

Effectively implement DevOps in your telecom organization

DevOps enables telecom operators to streamline their software development processes, increase competitiveness and foster innovation. Adopting this approach can also enhance your cloud environments and increase system resilience, which is particularly important for service stability and accessibility in the telecom industry.

If you want to learn more about implementing DevOps in telcos, download Your Guide to DevOps in Telecom Software Development. This comprehensive resource includes DevOps insights from Red Hat and Software Mind experts that will help you boost your telecom software delivery, effectively adopt the DevOps culture and measure the success of your DevOps initiatives.