CASE STUDY: NOKIA
By: Deepak Sharma
Tags: Case Study, Arth, Nokia, Kubernetes, DevOps

How Nokia Enabling 5G and DevOps at a Telecom Company with Kubernetes

what is kubernetes ?

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community .

OK, but why all the buzz? Why is Kubernetes so popular?

As more and more organizations move to microservice and cloud native architectures that make use of containers, they’re looking for strong, proven platforms. Practitioners are moving to Kubernetes for four main reasons:

Kubernetes helps you move faster.

Kubernetes is cost efficient.

Kubernetes is cloud agnostic.

Cloud providers will manage Kubernetes for us.

So, how does Kubernetes work?

The central component of Kubernetes is the cluster. A cluster is made up of many virtual or physical machines that each serve a specialized function either as a master or as a node. Each node hosts groups of one or more containers (which contain your applications), and the master communicates with nodes about when to create or destroy containers. At the same time, it tells nodes how to re-route traffic based on new container alignments.

The following diagram depicts a general outline of a Kubernetes cluster:

Then , How and Why NOKIA adapt Kubernetes

To adapting Kubernetes by NOKIA is a certain challegefull and there are many challenges faced by Nokia.

Challenges to NOKIA for adapting Kubernetes

Nokia’s core business is building telecom networks end-to-end; its main products are related to the infrastructure, such as antennas, switching equipment, and routing equipment. “As telecom vendors, they have to deliver their 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. “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. We want to run the same product on all of these different infrastructures without changing the product itself.”

Nokia was the first name in mobile phones when they were becoming ubiquitous in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But by 2014, the company had sold off its mobile device division and was focusing its core business not on the handhelds used for calls, but on the networks.

What solution Nokia has to overcome the challenge?

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.”

“Having the community and CNCF around Kubernetes is not only important for having a connection to other companies who are using Kubernetes and a forum where you can ask or discuss features of Kubernetes. But as a company who would like to contribute to Kubernetes, it was very important to have a CLA (Contributors License Agreement) which is connected to the CNCF and not to a particular company. That was a critical step for us to start contributing to Kubernetes and Helm.” — GERGELY CSATARI, SENIOR OPEN SOURCE ENGINEER, NOKIA

Nokia’s cloud native journey began about two years ago, when Csatari’s team was building the company’s Telephony Application Server (TAS). “We wanted to have a service execution engine in the product, which was a totally separate function from all other parts,” he says. “There, we had the possibility to think about new architectures and new tools that we could use. We created this particular product based on Kubernetes, and we liked the work, so we started to talk about cloud native and containers and all of these things. We did a very extensive research of different container orchestration tools. We knew that we have some, let’s say, strange or different requirements because of the special environment that our software is running on.”

Impact of Kubernetes on Nokia

Kubernetes has enabled Nokia’s foray into 5G. “When you develop something that is part of the operator’s infrastructure, you have to develop it for the future, and Kubernetes and containers are the forward-looking technologies,” says Csatari. The teams using Kubernetes are already seeing clear benefits. “By separating the infrastructure and the application layer, we have less dependencies in the system, which means that it’s easier to implement features in the application layer,” says Csatari. And because teams can test the exact same binary artifact independently of the target execution environment, “we find more errors in early phases of the testing, and we do not need to run the same tests on different target environments, like VMware, OpenStack, or bare metal,” he adds. As a result, “we save several hundred hours in every release.”

“When people are picking up their phones and making a call on Nokia networks, they are creating containers in the background with Kubernetes.” — GERGELY CSATARI, SENIOR OPEN SOURCE ENGINEER, NOKIA

The company has a long-term goal of moving the entire product portfolio into the Kubernetes platform. To that end, Nokia teams are working together with other companies to add the features needed to use Kubernetes with the real-time, nanosecond-sensitive applications close to the edge of the radio network.

And the CNCF community is proving to be a great forum for that collaboration. “I had some discussions at KubeCon with people from the networking SIG and the resource management working group, to work together on our requirements, and that’s very exciting for me and my colleagues,” says Csatari. “Previously, everybody had the same problem, but everybody just did it in his own, and now we are trying to solve the same problem together.”

“Kubernetes opened the window to all of these open source projects instead of implementing everything in house. Our engineers can focus more on the application level, which is actually the thing what we are selling, and not on the infrastructure level. For us, the most important thing about Kubernetes is it allows us to focus on value creation of our business.” — GERGELY CSATARI, SENIOR OPEN SOURCE ENGINEER, NOKIA

Perhaps the biggest impact that Kubernetes is having on Nokia, Csatari believes, is that people are starting to think about how a telecom company can do DevOps. “We are building a DevOps pipeline, which reaches from the actual developer to the customers, and thinking about new ways how can we digitally deliver our software to our customers and get feedback from the customers right to the engineers,” he says. “This is something that will fundamentally change how telecom companies are delivering software, and how quickly can we develop new features. This is because of the usage of containers and, of course, the usage of Kubernetes.”