CI/CD: Continuous software for continuous change

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CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) transform how telecom companies manage the full lifecycle of their software. Applying CI/CD practices and patterns establishes automated processes that shorten time to market, enhance service agility, and ensure seamless rollouts of new releases and features. Discover how adopting CI/CD can elevate your business and keep you ahead in a rapidly evolving market.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) aim to automate the entire software lifecycle, from system design and integration to testing and deployment. This approach ensures that software updates or configuration changes are thoroughly tested and validated before going into production. Automation applies to all operational processes, including provisioning infrastructure, deploying network functions, approving configuration changes, quality assurance, and monitoring. Establishing continuous pipelines for these processes ensures safe, quick, and sustainable delivery of all updates and changes.

Disaggregated Cloud Native systems and CI/CD practices complement each other. By breaking down large system updates into smaller, manageable changes, CI/CD allows teams to work in parallel, improving efficiency and minimizing the risks associated with large updates.

Continuous feedback loops in CI/CD build on comprehensive monitoring and logging to help quality assurance and drive performance improvements of the overall flow and individual pipeline stages, keeping the process agile and responsive. Flow engineering can be used to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, allowing for faster, high-quality software delivery.

In the telecom industry, disaggregated software and automation in CI/CD pipelines and operator processes are key enablers for a continuous delivery model with faster and smaller updates while having a smaller impact on network operations and providing the latest functionality and security updates without delays. For 5G Core networks and other systems, lifecycle management of the network and its underlying software can become a routine activity. It can be carried out as part of daily operational tasks instead of being a major undertaking requiring careful planning of maintenance windows and more when performed only once or twice a year at best.

Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice designed to ensure that software is built, tested, and ready for release frequently and securely. In CI, changes made by developers are rapidly integrated into the main codebase through an automated process. This frequent source code integration into a shared system allows teams to produce new or updated software assets immediately available for further evaluation or delivery.

A key purpose of CI is to maintain high software quality by providing rapid feedback on code changes. Automated testing tools catch issues early, ensuring that any new code meets quality standards and can be safely integrated. This process generates frequent software release candidates, essential for further evaluation in the Continuous Delivery phase.

CI also plays a crucial role in telecom and service provider environments by integrating new software releases into larger systems for testing and validation, ensuring they meet specific service provider requirements before moving into production.

Continuous Delivery (CD) automates preparing and validating software for release. Once the code passes through Continuous Integration, CD packages the software and deploys it to staging or test environments, where it undergoes further evaluation to ensure it meets quality standards. This ensures that software is always deployable, ready for production release when approved.

In traditional software development, releasing new versions was a complex, manual process prone to delays and risks. Continuous Delivery addresses these challenges by automating much of the testing and packaging process, significantly reducing the time and effort needed to prepare updates. However, the final step of deploying the software to production typically requires manual approval, ensuring control over what is released.

CD is vital in managing software from multiple suppliers, including open-source components and custom configurations, by validating it thoroughly before delivery to service providers. By automating these stages of the development lifecycle, CD accelerates release cycles, ensures reliability, and enables teams to focus on delivering value and continuously improving their services.

Continuous Deployment (CD) is a mechanism where every code change that passes automated testing is automatically pushed to production, allowing updates to reach users without manual intervention. This is the final step in the CI/CD pipeline, building on Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery by fully automating the deployment process.

Approval processes and acceptance criteria ensure that only high-quality updates are deployed. Once the code meets these standards, it is automatically deployed to the live environment, making new features or bug fixes immediately available to users. This approach enables organizations to be highly agile, delivering updates rapidly and frequently, which is particularly valuable in fast-evolving industries like telecom.

While Continuous Deployment depends on having robust CI and CD processes – like automated testing, integration, and small, frequent code changes – it removes the final barrier to faster deployments. By eliminating manual approval steps, Continuous Deployment speeds up innovation, enhances responsiveness to user needs, and reduces the risk of delays or human error in the deployment process.

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment are development and operations practices that share a common goal: to streamline and automate the software development lifecycle. While each focuses on different stages, they work together to ensure that new software updates and other changes are consistently delivered, tested, validated, and put into customer operations with minimal delay.

The 'continuous' aspect reflects the seamless flow from one stage to the next, enabling faster releases and ongoing value delivery. But CI/CD is more than just a technical process – it’s a strategic approach that supports a culture of continuous improvement, drives efficiency, and accelerates innovation.

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CI/CD pipeline stages

The CI/CD pipeline is a model for an automated Software Delivery Life Cycle and DevOps framework to govern and streamline software development and deployment and to actively manage risk. By integrating code changes frequently and automating testing and delivery, the pipeline enables teams to detect issues early, enhance productivity, and deliver reliable updates faster. With “CI” enabling development workflows and “CD” as Continuous Delivery or Deployment supporting operations teams, CI/CD improves feature development and safe delivery into production environments at a higher cadence. Below is an illustration of the key stages in a CI/CD pipeline, highlighting how each step contributes to a more efficient and error-free workflow.

With DevOps as a mindset of establishing seamless collaboration and feedback between development and operations teams, CI/CD provides the practices and patterns to establish automated flows for the various processes to handle a network's life cycle management. Implemented within an operator, it drives efficiency and quality by scaling operations more securely and streamlining workflows.

GitOps is the next piece in the puzzle as it applies software development version control best practices for code and surrounding processes to operations. While it helps software development teams meet the increasing customer demands for changes and new features, it supports operations teams securely and with quality running a changing network. Making incremental and small changes to software deployed and configured keeping commits automated, and continuously obtaining feedback through testing and monitoring. Keeping all changes in version control as a single source of truth transforms update projects into declarative life cycle management with infrastructure, platforms, and applications treated as code.

Explore how DevOps and CI/CD adoption fuel the shift toward 5G networks.

On-demand environment creation

CI/CD tools enable the creation of self-serviced production or test environments that are available on demand and ready when needed. This eliminates the weeks or months typically spent on manual environment setup.

Automated software deployment

By automating code and software deployments, CI/CD saves significant time in getting new features or updates to production. Developers can deploy code themselves, reducing delays and ensuring a faster release cycle. Software lifecycle management between vendor and service provider can, in the same way, be automated and enable a continuous, seamless, and secure flow between the two corporate entities.

Automated testing and setup

CI/CD automates test setup and execution, enabling safe deployment and parallel testing to keep pace with development and acceptance in production environment. This replaces the weeks spent on manual regression testing and test environment configuration.

CI/CD and cloud-native technologies go together in modern software development. Cloud-native platforms provide the scalability, flexibility, and automation required to support continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. By leveraging the cloud, CI/CD processes can be optimized to deliver software faster, more efficiently, and with greater reliability, making it a critical component for organizations aiming to innovate quickly and meet the demands of today’s dynamic digital landscape.

The cloud enhances CI/CD by offering automatic scalability. This enables resources to adjust dynamically based on project needs, speeding up testing and deployment. Flexibility comes from choosing different computing resources and frameworks that fit specific development requirements. Additionally, cloud platforms ensure reliability with features like data redundancy, disaster recovery, and load balancing, keeping CI/CD pipelines running smoothly despite disruptions.

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Adopting CI/CD in telecom environments requires a shift in operations, emphasizing collaboration between engineering and operations teams. This shift is crucial for achieving agility and efficiency, but it also brings challenges. One of the most significant barriers is the divide between operations teams (service providers) and development teams (service provider’s network and IT development teams, as well as vendors developing network software). This gap arises from differing priorities and traditional workflows, such as the legacy waterfall approach and siloed testing and deployment processes. Bridging this divide is essential for CI/CD to provide full business benefits such as agility and innovation.

To fully embrace CI/CD, telecom providers must align governance structures and organizational mindset with the principles of continuous delivery and test automation. Governance and mindset act as key drivers in shaping policies and ways of working in the people and process dimension. These, in turn, place requirements on the underlying CI/CD architecture – impacting technology decisions, toolchains, and implementation strategies. Redefining strategies and implementing flexible processes that support continuous deployment across multi-vendor environments is essential. Successfully addressing these challenges will help service providers create a high-cadence model where updates are deployed frequently and safely, enabling rapid innovation in a secure and efficient manner.

Implementing CI/CD in telecom

Implementing CI/CD in telecom begins by automating manual processes in lab environments, such as testing and software delivery. These initial steps can then extend to pre-production environments, where software upgrades and validations are carried out in a controlled setting before reaching full deployment in the production environment.

By automating these stages, telecom providers can shorten upgrade times, increase update frequency, and move toward a continuous software flow. This transition from manual to automated workflows enables more agile and secure software updates, with smaller, more frequent changes replacing larger, riskier deployments.

In multi-vendor 5G environments, CI/CD is critical for managing the integration and lifecycle of components from different vendors. Test automation ensures that all software works seamlessly together, improving efficiency and meeting operational SLAs. Tools and platforms like GitLab allow telecom providers to automate testing, software builds, and deployments across lab and production environments.

To help with this transition, Ericsson has developed a comprehensive guide for implementing CI/CD in a core network cloud-native telecom environment.

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In cloud-native networks, separating software lifecycle management from functional lifecycle management is essential for achieving efficiency and agility. This separation allows software updates to be implemented faster without disrupting core network functionality, which is critical in the fast-evolving telecom environment.

Software lifecycle management keeps applications and network functions software updated, secure, and optimized. In contrast, functional lifecycle management ensures the performance and operation of network functionalities, such as a 5G core network. These two lifecycle processes differ in many dimensions, like the speed of change, the impact of change, and the tools used for management. By managing these domains separately, operators can better handle the complexity of cloud-native networks, allowing for continuous improvement and quicker adaptation to new technologies like 5G and future 6G. This approach enhances business flexibility and helps operators stay competitive in an industry driven by rapid change.

Ericsson’s cloud-native products are designed to enable flexible deployment and adopt an “everything-as-code” approach for lifecycle management (LCM).

Our portfolio follows unified cloud-native principles like software flexibility, automation, and resiliency. To support this, we’ve developed the Application Development Platform, which provides tools, processes, and methods for CI/CD and cloud-native software design. Across our entire portfolio, we help you implement automated LCM, build independent microservices, and evolve your operational procedures for more efficient and scalable deployments.

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Elisa is one of the first CSP’s to launch 5G. Adopting DevOps principles through CI/CD for deploying new and updated software and products on demand is key to meet the requests of faster 5G networks. Download our case study explaining business drivers, challenges, and future steps on Elisa’s journey to CI/CD.

CI/CD: Continuous software for continuous change

CI/CD

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