Nokia Continuous Delivery

Make your telco software upgrades so smooth, you won’t even notice

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Nokia Continuous Delivery (NCD) supported by CI/CD Services is Nokia’s solution to deliver the benefits of DelOps CI/CD for telco operators.

What is Nokia Continuous Delivery (NCD)?

NCD is the single unified deployment and automation engine, purpose-built to manage the lifecycle of the entire Nokia Core network portfolio. A modular solution, NCD is able to adapt to a variety of customer and third-party CI/CD pipelines with enhanced test automation capabilities. It is built to be future-proof and is based on a cloud-native software architecture using best-in-industry components.

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Overview
What is Nokia Continuous Delivery (NCD)?
Features
Solution components
What's next?
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Nokia Continuous Delivery (NCD) solution features

Automated testing: Providing common and universal Test Framework for all verified CNFs with ease of use in mind (creation, execution, reporting). Supporting custom built ‘Test Packages’, where users can create and execute CNF acceptance test cases using their simulator of choice.

Software delivery and management: Secure pull replication from the Nokia Enterprise Artifactory Repository (NEAR) pull cluster to the highly available NCD Repo. NCD Repo Software Catalog provides a coordinated view of ORBs (OCI Release Bundle, where OCI is Open Container Initiative), products, CNF and network service instances.

Automated network function lifecycle management: Deploy, test, upgrade, and rollback network functions through NCOM (Nokia Cloud Operations Manager).

Pipeline and workflow automation: pretested workflows and creation of custom workflows/pipeline, tasks and actions by CI/CD Services.

CI/CD Services upload of network functions for deployment through the NCD pipeline

Observability and visibility: Portal to element/component user interface.

Nokia Continuous Delivery (NCD) solution components

The NCD solution consists of four main components

NCD Pipeline - The cloud or on-premises pipeline for coordinating delivery and testing activities in the deconstructed CI/CD architecture. Important workflows are available and pre-integrated with NCOM and can be customized for customer needs.

NCD Repository - Stores application artifacts on customer premises. Git-based workflow for version-controlled modification of CNF configuration files securely delivered via ORBs pulled from the NEAR pull cluster. NCD Repo is highly available (HA) and supports in-service software upgrade (ISSU).

Test Framework - Provides the execution framework for automated testing of an application and integration of different test harness tools. The Test Framework covers product and domain tests in a customer simulated environment.

Nokia Cloud Operations Manager (NCOM) - Automates the deployment, upgrade, and other lifecycle management operations of Nokia cloud-native applications, application suites, and network services in distributed, multi-tenant, multi-vendor cloud infrastructures while optimizing and governing the use of platform resources.

A list of the benefits and features of Nokia Continuous Delivery solution

Future proof, cloud-native software architecture using industry leading components.

Time-to-market ensured by automated deployment of new software packages.

Secure digital software delivery with possibility of automatic rollback to previous version in case of failure.

Simplification of workflows running in the background for product deployments and upgrades.

Lifecycle management of software products performed by NCD with NCOM.

Automated product and solution level testing with pre-packaged test cases in customer environment.

Freedom of choice offers test frameworks and reporting tools and/or custom workflow automation.

Flexible CI/CD services offer integration of NCD with operator-specific environments, including customer’s own CI/CD or third-party CI/CD framework.

Global experience of our experts ensures a smooth journey regardless of the complexity of your network.

What’s next for Nokia Continuous Delivery?

NCD Solution is a constantly evolving platform, we seek opportunity to take automation into the next level, following market trends and new open-source initiatives. As part of our automation journey, we embrace the new cloud-native trend of intent based automation known as GitOps, utilizing Kubernetes (K8s) native automation. There are several key areas we target: Git based repository; GitOps for configuration, GitOps for network function LCM (lifecycle management), GitOps for cluster/cloud LCM and infra provisioning.

NCD solution is also being improved for painless service-based integration including multi-cloud support, expansion of the REST API-based pipeline to serve multi-vendor cases, and pipeline-based test framework provisioning and control. Data-driven feedback loops covering failed tests and the monitoring of network functions telemetry will enable faster responses to discovered issues.

Our CI/CD solution is constantly evolving to improve the user experience by minimizing panes of glass and further simplifying the user workflow.