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Virtualization for Value-Added Telecoms Services
(Telco Tech EP01)

Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes

On our first episode of Telco Tech, Diego Vivas, Director Product Management and Tech Evangelist, talks with Walter Rott, one of our three cofounders and CTO for the network layer, about the big advantages our Telecoms Low-Code Application Platform brings to virtualization.

Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. To watch the full video, click here or go to Videos and Webinars.

Hi, I'm Diego with ECT, and I welcome you to the first episode of our series Telco Tech.
Today, we will discuss about virtualization. But, most importantly, the advantages that our Telecoms Low-Code Application Platform brings to the topic of virtualization.
And, for this, I have a special guest. Walter, thank you for joining us. For those that don't know you, why don't you tell our audience what your role at ECT is?

Yes, I'm the CTO and one of the co-founders of ECT and my role is the network layer of our T-LCAP product.

Great. So‚ why don't we take a step back?
We're talking about virtualization… but, why is it that telco networks have a cumbersome and slow reputation when it comes to realizing new services or even making changes or creating new features?

Well, the main reason is telecoms were using dedicated hardware and software. I remember when it took months to install cable and test multiple racks of bare-metal servers, right? Just for one service. And that is a very costly approach when it comes to installation and maintenance and even upgrades. Plus, you have to problem of being locked-in with the vendor because they use dedicated software which only runs on their hardware.

Yeah, correct. But I understand this has actually changed. Can you tell us why?

Well, first of all, we use virtualization for all our services and our T-LCAP platform runs on any common off-the-shelf server. And we are using standard NFV technology here. So that means the CSP can use any NFV manager to do the orchestration and the automated lifecycle management. And, with 'lifecycle management', I mean the installation, the upgrades, the monitoring and everything around the services and the platform.
And when it comes to monitoring, which is a very important topic, we are using Prometheus, Grafana Loki or Grafana Dashboard.

I get this question a lot: We have the topic of CI/CD and it plays an important role when it comes to deployment and new services. Can you explain us a bit more about this?

Good that you mentioned that. That's a very important point when it comes to agile service development.
So we are using standard tools like GitLab, Ansible scripting, Jenkins, and even Fastlane for the mobile deployments when it comes to continuous integration and continuous deployment. And, on top of that, we have our ECT element management system, which provides you workflows for moving your applications between the different platforms. So that means you move it from a development platform to a user-acceptance test platform and, then finally, to a production platform.

Okay! And around the topic of virtualization, we need to address the natural evolution… So: Cloud native. What's coming around the corner in this regard?

Yes, it's all about containerization. And with containerization, we further optimize the compute resources being used from the underlying network and platform and we provide our services as cloud-native. And what does that mean? It means that we compose our services with different microservices and they can be easily scaled up and scaled down. And for that, we are supporting all these standard platforms, like Kubernetes, Red Hat Open Shift, and VMware Tanzu.
And, by the way, we have a great e-book available on our website to download.

Thanks, Walter. So, all in all, I see these are great advantages for our customers, so‚ we have no dedicated hardware, their systems can expand and contract at will and, most importantly, react agilely to the demands via automated deployments that have also lack of human error.
So, thank you for being here.

Yeah, you're welcome.

It's not the last time that we will be seeing you here, so we invite you all to check our next video where we will discuss in detail a VNF manager and the advantages that it brings.
Thank you and see you next time.

Author:
ECT Editorial Team

Virtualization for Value-Added Telecoms Services (Telco Tech EP01)

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Virtualization for Value-Added Telecoms Services
(Telco Tech EP01)