The Role of DevOps in 5G Deployment and Network Operations

Dear friends, have you switched to a 5G phone? We say 4G changed life, 5G will change society. Do you know why 5G will change society? First, let's understand the 5G business scenarios.

From 1G to 4G, mobile communications focused on person‑to‑person communication, but 5G extends to person‑to‑thing and thing‑to‑thing communication. The 3GPP defines three major 5G scenarios, as shown in the figure.

eMBB refers to high‑throughput mobile broadband, mMTC to massive IoT, and URLLC to ultra‑reliable low‑latency communications such as autonomous driving and industrial automation. These complex new services require key technologies far beyond 4G, including distributed cloud, network slicing, edge computing, NFV, and SDN.

DevOps is the essential path for 5G implementation. Agile development breaks the wall between business and development, while DevOps breaks the wall between development and operations. Broadly, DevOps is a culture of end‑to‑end automation.

Traditional telecom networks are tightly integrated hardware‑software, closed and stable, with many services requiring hardware vendor support. 5G networks feature soft‑hard decoupling, X86 cloud hardware, layered software, and slicing, providing many opportunities for software vendors.

5G services are diverse and rapidly changing. Most equipment and solution vendors have their own DevOps pipelines and agile processes, but they cannot directly deploy to operators' live networks. Bridging the delivery gap between vendors and operators would greatly accelerate the telecom industry.

For DevOps, any software product can be handled by the pipeline regardless of the service. It is foreseeable that DevOps can be applied to 5G access and core networks. However, challenges remain, such as operators not allowing vendors to bring source code into the CT ecosystem, prompting research into component or service integration.

From an operations perspective, traditional 2G/3G/4G O&M platforms cannot support the centralized, unified configuration and management required by 5G. The decoupled, fine‑grained 5G software demands continuous release, and intelligent O&M for on‑demand vertical applications will be driven by DevOps.

Thus, the telecom domain is gradually converging with IT, and many 5G pain points require DevOps assistance. Looking ahead, can 3GPP standards become agile? Can O&M be handled by a unified pipeline? Can network entry licensing processes be automated? Let’s look forward.

Author: IDCF FDCC certified trainee Zhao Fuchen.

On October 17 (Thursday) at 8 pm, the "Winter Brother Speaks" special "Old R Record" invites Michael to discuss "20 Years of Software Engineering" – reply with the QR code to obtain the live stream address.