Understand the key requirements for establishing a CI/CD/CT pipeline to manage Open RAN
Beyond just opening up radio system interfaces to connect hardware and software components from different vendors, one of the big ideas of Open RAN is the parallel move to cloud-based environments and the network programmability that comes with that. In order for operators to do this effectively, they need to borrow from the world of IT software engineering and establish CI/CD pipelines to continuously integrate and deploy new features and optimizations.
But, due to the multi-vendor nature of an Open RAN system, the CI/CD part requires significant coordination between vendors. As Spirent Senior Director of Product Management Anil Kollipara described it, “We are moving to a more and more software and virtualized world where releasing weekly or even daily is a common practice. You can expect anywhere from 10x to 20x increase in the number of releases on Open RAN as you scale…What does that mean? It means operational complexity, and this is a key challenge as you start scaling Open RAN.”
Speaking during the Open RAN Global Forum, available on demand here, Kollipara also noted that not only is CI/CD needed to make the most out of a disaggregated RAN, there’s also the need to put in place a continuous testing regime. Put simply, if an operator is going to continuously push software updates into production, there’s a need to also continuously test the performance of those updates to ensure KPIs remain in the correct range.
With CI/CD/CT, he said, “You’re testing all these different permutations, all these frequent releases, security patches, upgrades coming from the software, upgrades coming from the underlying infrastructure continuously and though lots of parallel tests. And you’re able to deliver a RAN solution or a RAN configuration or permutation that is properly tested for all these different use cases [and] make sure it functions as well as performs as expected.”
Test lab federation and automation, and scalable API emulation key to CI/CD/CT
In terms of the key requirements needed to get CI/CD/CT right, Kollipara called out two main items: an automated and federated lab facility and scalable API-driven emulators.
To the lab piece, “That way you can use the resources to do all kinds of testing and do this very efficiently.” For the API emulation, “This is something I’m a bit passionate about talking, because we have pushed the industry, the network function vendors, to go more and more software and coming from a test and measurement industry, it doesn’t make sense for the test and measurement industry to lag behind and stay in the hardware world. We have to push ourselves to make sure that the emulators and the test and measurement industry is virtual [and] fits in this kind of an automation pipeline framework so that we can provide these kinds of benefits to our end customers.”
Big picture, “This is the only way that our customers can manage this complexity…and they can deliver value to their end customer very quickly, and they can do so while driving operational efficiencies.”
He gave the example of a Tier 1 Open RAN Spirent customers that has automated and federated their lab capabilities, and set up a CI/CD/CT pipeline covering L1 switches all the way to servers and network functions. “The pipeline can do all kinds of tests. It can do wraparound tests, end-to-end tests, adjacency tests, it can do compliance to the specifications of the RAN specifications. It can test for performance, it can test for capacity, security, all of these different use cases. And you can run hundreds of parallel test lines and this is critical when I talk about scalability.”
Kollipara summarized the benefits of CI/CD/CT for Open RAN as essentially reducing time to market, time to return and opex reduction.
