How Telcos can enhance their 5G Network Resilience, Uptime, Availability and Performance using Service Mesh Architecture and Chaos Engineering

Today’s telecom network architects are abandoning monolithic, purpose-built network equipments in favour of containerized network functions. It enables the Telcos respond more quickly to changing consumer needs, handle traffic more elastically, accelerate adoption of newer innovative softwarized network-functions from nimble neo-Techs/start-ups. ?All of this is happening because these softwarized network-functions are being built as cloud native microservices, taking full advantage of the elasticity of the cloud --- but usually in Telco manged data centres rather than Public cloud.

Nothing comes free, though cloud native microservices that power network-functions deliver the benefits of cloud elasticity, there is a architectural and technical complexity associated with adopting microservices. With many more moving parts than a monolithic network equipment, a microservice architecture requires considerably more automated observability and automated remediation. A typical container orchestration platform like Kubernetes provides falls short of this. And this is where Service Mesh Architecture over Microservcis architecture is needed. Open Source Technologies like ISTIO provide the needful observability needed for more effective and easier management, monitoring and securing microservices.

The Service Mesh architecture based on ISTIO provide a fundamental benefit of managing microservice to microservice connection i.e. routing data packets from a source softwarized network-function to the destination softwarized network-function instance. It also also provide network operations team with valuable benefits in the three key areas of observability, and telecom data traffic control and security.

But how to prevent bad consumer experience by preventing the occurrence of network-functions outages. By institutionalizing the usage of ‘Chaos Engineering Tool’ in telecom-network ?environment, telcos can build, deploy and run softwarized network-function landscape without losing the reliability of their telecom services to their customers.

To prevent outages, enterprises like Netflix spearheaded the use of chaos engineering as a solution approach.

Chaos engineering lets one predict and identify potential failures by breaking things on purpose. This way, one can find and fix failures before they become outages.

A Chaos Engineering Tool prescribes to network-operations team defined steady-state hypothesis: network-operations team need to start with an idea of what can go awry. Start with a failure to inject in a controlled manner (i.e., destroying the components of softwarized network-function for productive purposes and intent) and predict an outcome for when it is running live.

Using the Chaos Engineering Tool, network operations team terminates components of the softwarized network-function or terminates some of the network request and observes how the softwarized network-function landscape under observation behaves. E.g., observing what happens when 50% of the requests are terminated or when a flood of request is created. The Chaos Engineering Tool lets network operations team know whether the network-landscape is able to survive the chaos.?

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