Microservices : Enabling Intelligent Go-to-Market Strategy
Authored by Dinesh Kuruppu, Lead Consultant - Telecom at N-able (Private) Limited
Many communication service providers (CSPs) are moving quickly to introduce new add-on products and features such as fleet management solutions, IoT Solutions and smart home products to attract new customers and retain existing ones in order to beat the competition and incur more profits.
“Customers now have the upper hand in the customer journey. With more ways to shop and less time to do it, they don’t just gather information and complete transactions quickly. They often want to get it done on the go, preferably on a mobile device, without having to engage in drawn-out conversations.” - Ovum’s research in CIO magazine
Despite increasing pressure from competitors and their own customers to get applications up and running as soon as possible while minimising development costs, CSP/Enterprises face numerous challenges due to inefficient internal processes, which will slow time to market.
Adapting to the changing business environment while giving more focus on improving customer experiences, would be a challenging task. To facilitate this momentum and digital transformation, business operations such as sales, support, and delivery operations must evolve from a simple individualistic approach to a complicated collaborative style. One of the ways to make the system flexible, agile, and responsive for rapidly changing client requirements is, redesign the IT infrastructure within the telco eco system.
Traditionally, telcos used a monolithic approach to create software applications. The software was created to be self-contained. Components were intricately linked, interdependent and Developers used to collaborate on a shared pipeline. However, this approach hampered their ability to innovate and introduced new challenges such as scaling difficulties, lengthy build/test/release cycles, and long lead times for new features.
The Open Digital Architecture offers an industry-agreed blueprint, language and set of key design principles to follow. It will provide pragmatic pathways for the journey from maintaining monolithic, legacy software solutions, towards managing nimble, cloud based capabilities that can be orchestrated using AI. - White paper on 'Open Digital Architecture' from TM Forum
Adoption of microservices architecture is a crucial technique for supporting digital transformation, which has gained a rapid momentum across the telecommunications industry.
What are Microservices?
Microservices are small, versatile, and entirely self-contained software units that independently accomplish a given task. Unlike traditional software, microservices, do not require current program to be recoded for feature upgrades. It's as simple as adding one more independent component or module that blends with existing stack to offer new capabilities.?
Microservices, which are often, developed utilizing agile and DevOps approaches can assist Communication Service Providers (CSPs), in scaling their systems to meet changing business needs. It is founded on the notion of breaking down huge, complicated IT systems into multiple, readily controllable, and self-contained parts, each of which addresses a specific business purpose.?
Figure depicts Monolithic architecture vs. Microservices
What Telcos. /Enterprises need to know?
Adoption of Microservices architecture by telecom operators is a progressive and iterative process for which a long-term strategy should developed. CSPs must first lay the groundwork, Expertise, then discover, design, and develop suitable microservices use cases to get the most out of the MSA pattern.
Microservices are commonly deployed using platforms like Docker and package applications that specify for a particular task is contained in an isolated container. Communication between containers is through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
?Below highlighted expertise are essential for implementing microservices architecture
?It is more efficient and recommended to use the micro services in the cloud environment because of agility, security and lightness. It also enables telco operators to create cloud-agnostic solutions which can work multi-cloud environment at once.
What do businesses stand to gain from Microservices?
?Adoption of microservices will provide many benefits and support for the Telcos digital journey. Such as,
Use cases and Microservices Adoption Roadmap
?In the Telecommunications, domain main three areas are Business Support System (BSS), Operation Support System (OSS) and network management.
Microservices Architecture
For example generic northbound methods to create, read, update and delete the managed features and use standard application programming interfaces such as REST APIs for interaction between microservices.
How can N-able support?
Telecoms and other enterprises who want to take advantage of microservices architecture should look for reliable technology partner like N-able to help them overcome the challenges in adapting microservices.
N-able is already working with various platform providers to turn these challenges into business opportunities. With ample expertise in a variety of areas, including telecom solutions, high-quality software development services, and microservices architecture design, as well as cloud solutions, API integration, data analytics, and more, N-able will be a good partner in delivering resilient solutions for you to consider.
The writer can be contacted on [email protected].
Recognized Technical Solution advocate | Expert in IT solution design & delivery strategies
2 年Very happy to see you and your teams enthusiasm in microservices that will define the future application architectures all the way from systems of engagement to systems of record in CSP's. More than that the appreciation seen from your effort into this topic shows the evolution of a network engineer's thinking process. Well done!
Telco Technologist - Telco Core Network and PCC Expert
2 年Really good article which connects Micro-services and traditional telco services