By David Camilo Olea, Liberty Latin America
In a multiplatform telco environment, to offer a private cloud service requires many different platforms orchestrated and automated to provide a single interface for the B2B customers in the most cost effectively way. This paper describes how using automation tools such as Ansible in conjunction with other open-source platforms a whole solution could be developed and be part of the DevOps telecommunications environment to ensure that the continuous customer needs could be met.
The end-to-end architecture was developed including several tools: GIT repository, Ansible engine, back end databases and ManageIQ as customized front for B2B customers. This environment allows us to offer a self-service platform including security and interfaces to billing.
The new environment is fully DevOps oriented. This means that the definitions meet the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) requirements and the architecture is future-proof granting growth functionalities, adjusting to the new version and quickly features adding.
Most important benefits from this new architecture are Support Opex reductions (about 70%); improving the delivery time (from 2 days to 1 hour); new features available like VPN, metering by customer use; opportunities to execute new customizations according to the market needs.
The other important topic with automation is the cultural change in the organization. The success of any kind of project is to have engineers specialized in each field and with the disposition to work coding. This is the unique way to take a real advantage of the tools and it is a huge cultural change for many of our network, security and cloud experts to become in a new automation era engineer. It is possible in a short period of time.