Known for being the first name in mobile phones, 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 a telecom vendor, Nokia was looking for a way to deliver their software to a plethora of infrastructures without changing the product itself.
Moving to containerization and cloud native technologies like Kubernetes allowed their team to have infrastructure-agonistic behavior in their products. For example, By separating the infrastructure and the application layer, they have less dependencies in the system, which means that it’s easier to implement features in the application layer. Teams test the exact same binary artifact independently of the target execution environment, allowing them to find more errors in early phases of the testing and not having to run the same tests on different target environments, like VMware, OpenStack or bare metal. As a result, they save several hundred hours in every release. Their engineers can focus more on the application level, and not on the infrastructure level.
Perhaps the biggest impact that Kubernetes is having on Nokia is that people are starting to think about how a telecom company can implement DevOps practices. Nokia is building a DevOps pipeline, which reaches from the actual developer to the customers, and get feedback from the customers right to the engineers. This is something that will fundamentally change how telecom companies are delivering software, and how quickly they can develop new features. Find out more by reading the case study.
Save the Dates for 2019! Registration is open for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019, which will be taking place in Barcelona from May 20-23.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China will be happening from June 24-26. Registration is now open.
And finally, we will be in sunny San Diego for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America from November 18-21.