How Kubernetes impacts Nokia’s telecom industry.
By: Karthik Avula
Tags: Containers, Google, Kubernetes, Design, Nokia

How Kubernetes impacts Nokia’s telecom industry.

Hello everyone, welcome to the blog on Kubernetes. Many of you are still thinking what Kubernetes is ! Lets see what Kubernetes is and what it does.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is a famous open source container-orchestration system which is designed by Google. Kubernetes helps our application to divide into different containers in which particular container is meant for a particular purpose. It helps to maintain our application’s containers easily. We generally divide our application into micro-services(Services running on those containers), which makes the application best out of it.

Kubernetes Features

✴️ Automated rollouts and rollbacks

Kubernetes progressively rolls out changes to your application or its configuration, while monitoring application health to ensure it doesn’t kill all your instances at the same time. If something goes wrong, Kubernetes will rollback the change for you. Take advantage of a growing ecosystem of deployment solutions.

✴️ Service Discovery and load balancing

No need to modify your application to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. Kubernetes gives Pods their own IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods, and can load-balance across them.

✴️ Storage Orchestration

Automatically mount the storage system of your choice, whether from local storage, a public cloud provider such as GCP or AWS, or a network storage system such as NFS, iSCSI, Gluster, Ceph, Cinder, or Flocker.

✴️ Batch Execution

In addition to services, Kubernetes can manage your batch and CI workloads, replacing containers that fail, if desired.

✴️ Horizontal Scaling

Scale your application up and down with a simple command, with a UI, or automatically based on CPU usage.

✴️ Self Healing

Restarts containers that fail, replaces and reschedules containers when nodes die, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.

and many.

Lets see how Kubernetes helps Nokia (in Espoo, Finland)

Today, Nokia is building telecom networks end-to-end — from antennas to switching and routing equipment — serving operators in more than 120 countries. “As telecom vendors, we have to deliver our software to several telecom operators and put the software into their infrastructure, and each of the operators have a bit different infrastructure, says Gergely Csatari, Senior Open Source Engineer at Nokia. There are operators who are running on bare metal. There are operators who are running on virtual machines. There are operators who are running on VMware Cloud and OpenStack Cloud.

Challenge :

We want to run the same product(operations) on all of these different infrastructures without changing the product itself.

Solution:

The company decided that moving to cloud native technologies would allow teams to have infrastructure-agnostic behavior in their products. Teams at Nokia began experimenting with Kubernetes in pre-1.0 versions. The simplicity of the label-based scheduling of Kubernetes was a sign that showed us this architecture will scale, will be stable, and will be good for our purposes, says Csatari. The first Kubernetes-based product, the Nokia Telephony Application Server, went live in early 2018. Now, all the products are doing some kind of re-architecture work, and they’re moving to Kubernetes.

Impact:

By separating the infrastructure and the application layer, Nokia have less dependencies in the system, which means that it’s easier to implement features in the application layer. And because teams can test the exact same binary artifact independently of the target execution environment, they find more errors in early phases of the testing, and they do not need to run the same tests on different target environments, like VMware, OpenStack, or bare metal. As a result, they can save several hundred hours in every release

This is one of the challenge solved by K8s, they are many such case studies in which many companies are getting benefitted. Please refer to below link for more case studies.

https://kubernetes.io/case-studies/

Thanks for reading my blog. Hope you all loved this blog and I will come up next time with an another exciting blog. This blog I have written is a part of my journey in ARTH — The School of Technologies, guided by World Record Holder Mr. Vimal daga.