How 5G Is Driving the Next Generation of Operations Platforms

Background

On November 1, the commercial launch of 5G began, with the three major carriers releasing 5G plans. The arrival of 5G brings new requirements for operations: increased complexity of scenarios and expanding operational boundaries.

Unlike e‑commerce or finance, telecom operators provide resource services (voice, traffic) that change continuously, demanding real‑time traffic assurance and more sophisticated monitoring.

The traditional siloed operation model (business‑domain and network‑domain) faces challenges such as isolated systems, lack of end‑to‑end service guarantees, and the need to evolve with cloud and container technologies.

Technical Operations Platform

The platform combines "technical operations" and a "mid‑platform". Technical operations go beyond traditional stability and security metrics, also focusing on efficiency and customer experience.

A mid‑platform should serve the entire enterprise; it abstracts common capabilities from business, network, and IT domains and makes them reusable.

Key principles include extracting capabilities from repeated scenarios, building a unified capability library, and enabling flexible service governance such as rate limiting and circuit breaking.

Technical Operations Practice

Based on ecosystem capabilities, the team has built scenario‑driven solutions, including a CMDB with customizable attributes and models, automated data collection, and quality governance.

Monitoring has been standardized with defined metrics (e.g., memory usage, processing latency) and thresholds, enabling fine‑grained data quality control.

Team transformation includes shifting from passive incident response to proactive control, providing end‑to‑end traceability, and integrating automated emergency response workflows.

AIOps Exploration

The AIOps layer uses Flink for both offline and online processing. "Learning components" (学件) combine data and algorithms into reusable modules that can be invoked for similar scenarios.

These components enable rapid model training, visualisation, and reuse, improving anomaly detection, root‑cause analysis, and automated remediation.

Future Outlook

In the 5G era, the expanding ecosystem will demand operations that can adapt to diverse industries while preserving core capabilities. The platform will evolve toward stronger orchestration, intelligent scheduling, and automated capability composition.