How 5G Is Driving DevOps Adoption in Telecom: Guangdong Mobile’s Cloud‑Native Journey

During the 2019 DevOps International Summit in Beijing, Guangdong Mobile and Huawei announced their first carrier‑level DevOps deployment for 5G network elements, marking a new direction for IT‑driven telecom operations.

Traditional network‑element rollout can take up to eight months, involving ITU standard approval, vendor trials, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) testing, and multiple vendor‑specific deployment steps. This long cycle hampers rapid service introduction.

5G introduces two key technical shifts: virtualization/software‑defined network functions and cloud‑native hardware (X86 servers). These changes turn the telecom core into a large‑scale IT network, prompting operators to adopt DevOps practices.

DevOps Pipeline Implementation

The joint effort with Huawei built a three‑month DevOps pipeline that includes:

Uploading network‑element packages to a public network (as a pilot), storing artifacts in Nexus and GitLab, and encrypting deployment scripts and keys.

Configuring Jenkins jobs that launch Docker containers running Ansible, pulling playbooks, encrypted files, and host inventories.

Using Ansible to call OpenStack APIs, provision VMs, retrieve packages from Nexus, install and start the software.

Result: deployment time for a network element dropped from half a day to 3 minutes 23 seconds, a reduction of over 90%.

Future Directions

Planned improvements include package MD5 verification, public‑network security controls, deeper CI integration with vendors, and exploring container‑based deployment for future 5G micro‑service and slicing scenarios.

Long‑term goals involve embedding DevOps into 3GPP standards and leveraging AIOps for vertical 5G applications, enabling agile, continuous deployment across the telecom ecosystem.

Q&A Highlights

Discussions covered the role of entry‑network licences, the difficulty of obtaining frequent software updates, and the need for industry‑wide policy changes to automate licence verification.