CI/CD

One key aspect when implementing CI/CD pipelines is trust in the automation. Here being able to stay in control and maintain manual intervention points is important. Also being able to add an additional security assessment of incoming software at delivery time is a typical service provider requirement.  

To further ease the introduction of CI/CD automation assets are delivered with our products and have been tested along the software in Ericsson R&D. CSPs validate the automation together with the updated software in labs before both are being applied in production networks.  

Full CI/CD is not happening over night but evolves stepwise from traditional, mostly manual upgrades towards an “Everything as code” approach to LCM. With this evolution upgrade characteristics change. First, service provider can reduce upgrade duration and increase cadence. They move from upgrades happening in a predefined maintenance slot of a few hours and a limited amount of upgrade slots per year, maybe 2, towards an automated continuous software flow with shorter time windows needed and more updates per year becoming feasible. CI/CD is changing gradually the ways of working and software upgrade is starting to become a standard operational procedure, where everybody feels secure and safe. 

Another key aspect impacting CI/CD and the benefits that can be achieved through automation is applications being designed with automated life cycle management in mind and the advances of the underlying technology. With cloud native architectures and application designs application upgrades evolve from large, from complex procedures with extensive acceptance & regression testing towards upgrades of smaller independent software modules, which can happen during busy hours. In the future, ideally, we want to update several microservice per day and run very focused (canary) testing.  

Over time service provider will experience the full potential of automated life cycle management through a combination of automated CI/CD flows, truly cloud native application design and matching ways of working.  

CI/CD is especially important when deploying and life cycle managing solutions with components created and supplied by multiple vendors, such as 5G. Fitting multiple vendors’ components into a deployment and configuration automation is a complex task for communication service providers (CSPs). Each piece must work seamlessly with peer components to deliver an end-to-end working solution. To reap the benefits, CSPs must expedite the solution to these challenges of multi-vendor environments.  

The increasing importance of CI/CD in a multi-vendor environment

Any vendor or service provider hoping to stay in the customer environment beyond the first deployment must consider the life cycle of the deployed products and services. Manually managing these software and services is error-prone and increasingly impractical. ‘Manual’ is a thing of the past. Instead, CSPs are using tools such as Jenkins, Spinnaker, GitLab and Tekton to: set up the continuous integration of code, build software and test and continuously deliver the built software to all relevant customer lab and production sites. CI/CD enables the vendor to expedite the software delivery while adhering to the customer’s operational SLAs.  

CI/CD tools enable vendors and service providers to achieve a variety of important tasks. These include: 

• Automation of unit and regression testing of the newly developed code at the vendor shop  
• Software build automation, security and functional testing 
• Continuous new code or software component integration and end-to-end (e2e) testing 
• Continuous stress and soak testing 
• Full or delta software patch delivery to lab and production sites (continuous delivery) 
• Automated and visualized installation of new or upgraded software at the end-customer sites