Superuser Award

2020 Superuser Awards Nominee: China Mobile Network Cloud Integration Team

China Mobile Network Cloud Integration Team is one of eight nominees for the Superuser Awards to be presented at the 2020 Open Infrastructure Summit. Rate them by September 28.

September 22, 2020
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It’s time for the community to help determine the winner of the 2020 Open Infrastructure Summit Superuser Awards. The Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner after the community has had a chance to review and rate nominees.

Now, it’s your turn.

China Mobile Network Cloud Integration Team is one of eight nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate them before the deadline September 28 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Rate them here!

Who is the nominee?

China Mobile Network Cloud Integration Team

How has open infrastructure transformed the organization’s business? 

Cross-vendor integration becomes one of the biggest challenges for telco cloud. Our team builds up automation tools and CI/CD pipeline to deal with the challenge.

  • Fast cross-vendor interoperability: Set up CI/CD pipelines connecting with vendor labs to provide iterate test. Vendor software can integrate continuously for more than 10 times per week.
  • Improve delivery efficiency: We developed an automation tool, named ‘AUTO’, to support OpenStack cloud delivery across the country. Only 20 minutes are needed for configuration and 80 minutes for overall check per pod. IaC solution for fast copy across regions
  • Enhance quality: Full-scale quality check with over 15,000 issues found and solved. The configuration fault rate reduces from 30% due to manual operation to zero.

How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open source project?

We have been contributing to OpenStack since 2013. So far, we have given one keynote and nine sessions at OpenStack and Open Infrastructure Summits, and have served on the Programming Committee six times. We are also active contributors to the Telco and Edge Computing Working Group. We are founding members and active contributors in OPNFV since 2014. We serve as OPNFV TSC and PTLs for multiple projects. We are founding members for CNTT since 2019 and deeply involved in RI and RC activities. We are serving as CNTT Gov co-lead and RI and RC WSL. Since 2013, we have presented two keynote speeches and 25 sessions in LF events, contributing more than 2,000 codes. We are contributing the general pod description model and hardware validation framework we used across the country, and are also planning to open source our CI/CD flow and interfaces.

What open source technologies does the organization use in its open infrastructure environment?

All of our network clouds are based on OpenStack and KVM. In the meantime, we have developed an automation platform based on Ansible, Django, fastapi, traefik, postgres, redis, celery, pgadmin, nginx, Docker, and Docker-compose. Our CI/CD pipeline is based on Jenkins and Docker. And other open source technologies we use include, but not limited to, are  Kubernetes, CentOS, Ironic, Git, DPDK, OVS, ODL, Allure, bootstrap, pytest/unittest, robot framework, and Ceph.

What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?

China Mobile network cloud includes more than 60,000 physical servers, 1,440,000 cores so far, all based on OpenStack and KVM. These servers are distributed in eight regions across the country and support core network services of more than 800 million users across China. The above mentioned self-developed AUTO platform has been used in every region across the country. So far, we have tested 68 resource pools, covering more than 60,000 servers, 11,000 switches, and more than 500,000 network connections in CI/CD manner. The CI/CD pipeline in China Mobile’s lab is based on Jenkins and other open source CI/CD tools. It now supports continuous deployment and test iteration for four vendors, covering test cases of more than 500 each time.

What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure? 

  • Network scale: China Mobile has one of the world’s biggest OpenStack clouds. We always keep this in mind when designing our automation platform. We use distributed structure to improve the efficiency of automatic configuration, and testing and firmware upgrades, and apply portable hardware and software integration device to simplify AUTO deployment and remote operation.
  • Multi-vendor: More than 20 vendors are included in our network cloud. It is our team’s mission to build up the cloud by integrating the hardware and software products from these vendors. OpenStack has helped us a lot acting as the de-facto standard. However, we still face challenges when integrating the overall NFV architecture as it also includes other components like distributed storage, SDN controller, VNFM, and MANO.

How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?

To solve the integration challenge, a CI/CD pipeline is designed to provide continuous testing, integration, and delivery for multi-vendor cloud. With this, version updates from vendors will automatically invoke continuous deployment and testing in our lab. Making sure problems are fully revealed and solved, the new version can be automatically delivered on site. The team makes the following innovation:

  • Design common language and data template for multi-vendor integration. Build IaC tools to automatically generate data matrixes.
  • Innovate framework to reduce workload in adapting multi-vendor products by only filling in a configuration file.
  • Design CI modules to fit into changing scenarios for integration, making sure the whole pipeline can cover every scenario that can happen for NFV.

Each community member can rate the nominees once by September 28 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

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