How China’s Three Major Telecom Operators Tackle Cloud‑Native Adoption: Insights & Lessons

Roundtable Overview

On November 19, 2020, at the CNBPS 2020 Beijing closed‑door meeting, solution architects from China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom discussed how the three major telecom operators are applying cloud‑native technologies.

Participants

Zhao Xin (Lingqueyun) – moderator.

Zhao Chun – China Mobile Innovation Center.

Zhang Yawei – China Unicom Tianhang Cloud Platform architect.

Xiao Yanchang – China Telecom Cloud‑Network Operations.

Key Achievements and Platforms

China Mobile has built a self‑developed PaaS called “Pan‑Ji PaaS”, now operating about 59 clusters, supporting more than 30 primary systems and over 100 million users, with more than 30 000 containers.

China Unicom’s “Tianhang Cloud” evolved from 2015 container‑based micro‑service and DevOps foundations to version 4.0, offering multi‑tenant, Kubernetes, and private‑cloud portal capabilities, and now serves as a unified digital foundation for the group.

China Telecom has defined a three‑level cloud‑native migration standard (L1‑L3) and a PaaS component checklist, driving a nationwide migration of roughly 4 000 IT systems within three years, with dedicated platforms such as “Yunyan”, “Yunyi”, “Yundao” and “Yunqiao”.

Common Challenges

Lengthy project approval cycles hindering rapid front‑end application delivery.

Night‑time cut‑over windows creating tight deployment schedules.

Rollback complexities and service disruption during cut‑overs.

Standardizing micro‑service granularity and avoiding “heavy” services.

Ensuring cross‑data‑center image distribution and storage performance.

Aligning technical understanding across provinces, partners and internal teams.

Practical Pitfalls and Solutions

Examples include network isolation caused by mismatched IaaS parameters, container image distribution using a hierarchical repository with Dragonfly P2P acceleration, and the need for end‑to‑end monitoring (the “Yunyan” platform) to pinpoint failures across layers.

Future Path

Operators stress that cloud‑native adoption must be driven by clear business value, provide ready‑to‑use tooling, and lower the technical barrier for developers and operators. The roadmap includes deeper promotion of cloud‑native practices, standardized PaaS components, and collaborative open‑source ecosystem building.