DevOps for Software-Defined Telecom Infrastructures
Ericsson
Telecom Italia
SICS
Politecnico di Torino
EICT
AT&T
Ixia
Ericsson
Carrier-grade network management was optimized for environments built with monolithic physical nodes and involves significant deployment, integration and maintenance efforts from network service providers. The introduction of virtualization technologies, from the physical layer all the way up to the application layer, however, invalidates several well-established assumptions in this domain. This draft opens the discussion in NFVRG about challenges related to transforming the telecom network infrastructure into an agile, model-driven environment for communication services. We take inspiration from data center DevOps on the simplification and automation of management processes for a telecom service provider software-defined infrastructure (SDI). A number of challenges associated with operationalizing DevOps principles at scale in software-defined telecom networks are identified in relation to three areas related to key programmable management processes.