I joined Ericsson five years ago and have spent these years as a software developer for the Cloud Core Policy Controller, the “brain” of the network taking real-time decisions on things like data speed, quality of service, and charging rules based on user subscriptions and network conditions.
Here I’ve had the chance to see firsthand the 5G and cloud-native transformation of Ericsson Policy software, from early development to its introduction to millions of end users in live networks.
My journey
When I joined Ericsson in 2019, as a telecommunication engineer who came from academia with an interest in distributed systems and research, working on Core Network software development gave me the opportunity to contribute to two exciting areas of evolution happening simultaneously: the implementation of 5G standards and use cases on top of existing software, and the migration from virtualized to cloud-native platforms.
Both meant looking at old telco problems with new eyes: robustness, quality of service, security, telco standards, networking and Linux, now through the lens of new latency, reliability, bandwidth and device count requirements, containerization, microservices, continuous integration and Kubernetes. This has given me the opportunity to learn about the technology behind it all, the traditional use cases —and more recently, as the product is introduced, the real customer experiences—, while still solving new problems with new technology.
What I like the most
As much as I enjoy what we do, what I like most is the freedom to pursue my interests with a vibrant community of engineers that feels close to home. They have given me the chance to really understand all the different roles involved in building telco software in such a large organization, to freely explore new ideas, to meet them in hackathons and other in-person events, and even to start a newsletter about the developer communities. What I like the most about Ericsson are the people I work with and what they inspire me to do.