Amdocs Unveils Platform for Building Microservices
Amdocs, at the Mobile World Congress 2018 conference this week, launched a microservices-focused development platform based on Kubernetes that is optimized to meet the requirements of telecommunications service providers.
Daniela Perlmutter, vice president of product marketing for Amdocs, says AmdocsOne provides a complete container-as-as-service (CaaS) platform for building microservices. In addition to the core platform, Amdocs has included the Jenkins software to provide a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, and a set of best practices and methodologies derived from work it has done with more 350 customers.
AmdocsOne was designed in a modular fashion, Perlmutter notes, which enables DevOps teams to swap out any component in favor of another technology they prefer.
Other features of AmdocsOne include a catalog that makes it easier to reuse microservices and a suite of tools for monitoring those services in a production environment based on the open source Prometheus project.
Perlmutter says AmdocsOne is built completely on open source code that the company curates on behalf of its service provider customers.
Telecommunication carriers are dealing with a massive wave of disruption brought on by the need to virtualize services. As a result, they are embracing microservices architectures to build and update new services. Naturally, many of them could opt to use any one of several development platforms. But Perlmutter says AmdocsOne is specifically tailored to meet the requirements of network service providers, many of which are now starting to build virtual network functions (VNFs) using Docker containers.
Most of those providers, however, have only sparingly adopted DevOps practices. AmdocsOne is intended to enable service providers to accelerate that transition by providing a complete platform for managing DevOps end to end.
A recent global survey of senior leaders of IT telecommunications and media providers conducted by Analsys Mason on behalf of Amdocs finds that 82 percent of the respondents say the need for greater business agility and innovation is driving adoption of cloud-native technologies and DevOps practices. Today, 80 percent of digital, BSS and OSS systems run on top of virtual or physical data centers. The goal is by 2022 to have more than 90 percent of systems running on some form of cloud infrastructure, the survey finds.
The good news is that 64 percent say microservices architecture will be a requirement for new systems within two years. But only 46 percent are currently employing DevOps practices. Twenty-seven percent are still evaluating DevOps methodologies, while 18 percent have a plan in place to adopt DevOps within the next one to two years.
There’s no doubt that many service providers will be both technically and culturally challenged when it comes to building microservices. Many of them have been employing traditional waterfall methodologies to deliver services that historically took years to build and then were infrequently updated. But as customers demand more agility from carriers in the age of the cloud, it’s clear that legacy approaches to building applications and services are not up to the challenge.
