Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:13):
Hello, you are watching the Cloud Native Telco Summit, part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and we have a special program today with the help of Swisscom, we answer some of the most common questions around cloud native workflows, roles and practices that we have received from Summit viewers. And joining me are Joel Studler, who is DevOps Engineer at Swisscom and Ashan Senevirathne, who is product owner also at Swisscom. Well, hello, good to meet both of you, and thanks so much for bringing your firsthand experience to help us answer some of these really common and regular viewer questions we get. But before we do, I'd just like to ask you, first of all, Ashan, what does cloud native mean to you?

Ashan Senevirathne, Swisscom (01:06):
Yeah, so first of all, thanks for having us. So cloud native is much more than having workloads deployed on hyperscalers for an example, because you hear this term quite a lot often in the industry. And while that might be part of the process at its core, cloud native is much more about how you design, build, and run new applications. It's more about leveraging microservices, containers, automation and just to make your systems more scalable, resilient, and agile. And it's really a whole new way of thinking about infrastructure and applications and also large parties also, how you transform your organization, how you simplify your change processes. And all these things comes along with how you can keep these workloads more scalable and resilient. So it's fundamentally rethinking how your technology works to make everything more efficient and adaptable, in my view.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:00):
That's great, Ashan, because we do have a lot of questions from viewers about what cloud native means, and every panel we do, we get different versions of what Cloud native actually represents. But can I also ask you Ashan, how important is cloud native to Swisscom?

Ashan Senevirathne, Swisscom (02:18):
Cloud native is absolutely central to what we are doing at Swisscom. We are undergoing through a big transformation, what we call moving from a traditional telco to a technology company or we call it a TechCo, and it's not just a buzzword for us. It's fundamentally shifting how we think and operate our networks. Now, in order to achieve this, we've got a couple of initiatives going internally. One is the SRE transformation and the other one is the cloud native transformation. And what's exciting in here is it's also not driven top down. We have our engineers taking ownership and driving the innovation and also taking a community driven, a decentralized approach that everyone's empowered to make the decisions and also making this transformation work.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:05):
Great. Thanks Ashton. Really interesting and we'll come on to SREA little bit later in our chat, but Joel I'd like to bring you in as well from your perspective in your work at Swisscom, just how important is,

Joel Studler, Swisscom (03:18):
I think it's really important because cloud native is a development that has been going on for a few years now in the community, and that's maybe also something I feel like the definition of cloud native. I tends to see it the way CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation actually defines it. And it's really organized around this community driven approach to actually write software together, enhance it together, test it together, and find the best possible solutions for the industry. And because Swisscom is embracing cloud native for years now, I think it's crucial for our success. Swisscom is not only a telco, it's also an IT provider like doing professional services for external companies. So it has been around for a while and now the telco part of Swisscom also needs to adapt. Right.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:16):
Great. Thanks Joel. And as you said there, you've been doing cloud native for a long time at Swisscom. We've been following your activities for a number of years, but I'd like to move on now to some of our viewer questions. And I've got a first one here and Joel let me address this one to you first if I may. And the question asks, we already have developers working on specific projects, but is it more productive to combine all our distributed resources and create a central team? What would you say to that?

Joel Studler, Swisscom (04:50):
Yeah, I see where the question is coming from. I mean, I see some advantage in centralizing things, but in general, I think the industry is moving more towards a decentralization. We've seen it with the dev and ops teams in the past that didn't really work out. There was a lot of tension. We've introduced DevOps, we're introducing more and more things into this DevOps way of working. But you need to balance it in a way. And what I think is crucial to have in a company of a bigger size is to have enabling teams that provide services to other teams, just like a cloud service you consume from a hyperscaler, but to have these kind of enabling services and platform teams that help you getting the stuff done, especially on Kubernetes, it's hard to distribute all this deep knowledge you need in order to operate and actually run Kubernetes properly. So there, I think that's really helpful to have enabling teams that are centralized and that provide these services to the rest of the company.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:06):
Great. Great advice. Thanks so much indeed for helping with that one. Another question we have here, and Ashan, let me put this one to you. And the question states, we are constantly changing our structure and roles from DevOps to platform engineers to site reliability engineers and so on. Nothing stays the same for long. Is it necessary to follow the latest cloud native role definitions or are these roles actually more fluid and flexible?

Ashan Senevirathne, Swisscom (06:41):
Yeah, I think that's a great question. As UL mentioned earlier, even DevOps, it has many terms now like DevSecOps, dev, DevOps and finops, et cetera. I think in a cloud native environment role needs to be flexible. At Swisscom, we have found that sticking to rigidly to define these roles like DevOps, platform engineer, SRE, it can really hold us back. And what's more important for us is the skills and the mindset that individuals bring to the table. In the end, and as we are transitioned from this telco to TechCo, we've learned that roles should evolve too obviously. And instead of following these latest strengths in role definitions, we should focus on creating roles that suits our goals and also the projects. So I guess the final, the answer would be flexibility and the adaptability is needed and it should really driven by the projects and the goals of this transmission.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:39):
Great, thanks. Ashan, we hear this as well. There's a real focus on specific roles, but really what's the business outcome? What are we trying to achieve as well? Joel let me come across to you for your thoughts on how rigidly we should stick to roles or should we be more flexible?

Joel Studler, Swisscom (07:57):
Yeah, so I feel like the most successful way of implementing that, I think it's important to have some flexibility and what's most crucial to understand as a company and as a company as a whole from the engineer to the managers is to understand the importance of ownership, I guess. I think it's really, it's crucial to have a community internally in a company or even globally across multiple companies that take ownership for certain topics and really drive things forward without the exactly declared role that actually allows them to do so. I think ownership, moving things forward, trying to make a change, trying to progress on certain topics, I think that's crucial for a company to succeed in general.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:54):
Great. Well thanks so much both of you for those answers. Moving on to our next question and Joel let me stay with you for this one, the question asks, our cloud native activity is being driven by the IT division. How do we best integrate and align this work with the network division?

Joel Studler, Swisscom (09:13):
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think the general perception of these two divisions, let's say, or industries even, is that the IT industry is ahead of us. We currently think that in the cloud native world, I mean you can see broad adoption in the IT world with new apps coming around that will be cloud native and truly cloud native. So that's very nice. That's very great. However, I think there are still many unsolved problems in this IT world. For instance, config management, we have some tools available to manage this kind of the complexity we have in configurations. However, I think these tools like Helm customize or even more legacy stuff like Terraform or jinja, they solve certain problems, but they really hit a limit at some point. And I think we need to jointly work on this together, the telco and the IT industry to really find solutions that work, that actually scale that allow us to do proper, proper and stable operations. I think even GitHubs to some extent has a limit and there are some voices in the industry and the IT industry that really point towards Telco for leading the way on configuration management for instance. So I think it should be more of a collaboration rather than telco thinking We are still lacking behind. We should really learn from each other. I think.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:54):
Thanks so much, Joel. We have one more viewer question. I'm going to come back to you because you mentioned, or you alluded to this earlier, the question is, is a robust and functional cloud native operation necessary before you can start a site? Reliability, engineering transformation and SRE transformation? We are being advised by our partners that we need to spend on SRE Ashan. Your thoughts on this?

Ashan Senevirathne, Swisscom (11:22):
Yeah, so it's my answer would be not at all, but it also depends on the context of what it means by SRE because SRE is a quite broad topic. It has seven principles, so you can apply it based on different maturity levels. So on the cloud native end, you don't need to have a fully mature cloud native operations before diving into SRE. In fact, at Swisscom we are using SRE or the reliability practices on the service layer, which are underneath there all the 4G technology. So these are applied on the virtual network functions. So what's important in this reliability is focus on the service layer and it's regardless of what underneath technology. So it could be either 4G 5G or V NFS or the CNFs and on the cloud native end investing in SRE can really help us to accelerate the cloud native journey because you're embedding these best practices from start. Yeah. So it's less about waiting one thing to be fully in place and more about growing these capabilities in peril because you can apply them in different maturity levels where CNFs are quite mature from the cloud native end and VFS are not that mature.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:35):
Great, thanks Ashan. So don't wait. Keep focusing on SRE. Thanks very much for those comments. Excellent. Thank you so much both of you for addressing those of viewer questions. But let's end with a final question from me. What are the next steps on your cloud native program at Swisscom? Because I'm sure a lot of our viewers who've taken leads and advice from what you've just been saying, they'd be interested to know where you are heading next. Joel, what's your comments here? Where might Swisscom move with its cloud native activities?

Joel Studler, Swisscom (13:08):
So I think the important thing for us is focusing on telco. So I cannot speak for the other divisions of Swisscom, but in telco I think the goal is really to try to make things cloud native to make, run it in Kubernetes or Kubernetes like environments. So one example is this whole netcom topic. So netcom by design is not cloud native, it's not even declarative. It's a protocol that by design is not cloud native yet every vendor and everyone seems to embrace it in telco. So that's clearly one thing. We try to move into a more cloud native direction with reconciliation with all the features we get from Cloud native. So there's this tool called SDC, we've already introduced it at Q con by some people at Nokia initiated. We try to continue on configuration management to really have a proper way on configuring these CNFs.

(14:12):
I mean we have thousands of parameters in our applications that we need to somehow configure and we wish to have some kind of dynamic configuration system where we were able to automate the configuration management at least partially and not needing to rely on manual interaction for each and every config change. I think these are the two main topics. And then of course focusing on the community building internal communities, external, the global community, trying to really collaborate with other telcos. And we are also trying to shift our focus more to open source opensourcing things and collaborating, contributing to open source projects.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:00):
Really interesting. Thanks very much Joel. And Ashan, what can you add here? Where are you seeing Swisscom moving with its cloud native activities in telco?

Ashan Senevirathne, Swisscom (15:10):
Yeah, so if I zoom out a little bit and add a bit more context to what you all mentioned. So the next big thing for us is to have our 5G dual remote coin production and scaling all the tooling and the capabilities that we've introduced to the dual remote coin to areas like voice services and the O-S-S-B-S-S tooling. And we also ensure that whatever we do, we use SRA practices from start and also in line with the cloud native principles and beyond this technology aspect, we are also challenging how we operate the network aiming to simplify the change processes and also mainly focusing on the people transformation aspect as well. So it's not just a tech transformation. We are going through a big cultural shift here internally. Maybe one last thing is we are also organizing a cloud native forum, so this is happening end of the year with other European operators mainly targeting. So keep an eye for it, we'll share more information closer to the date on that.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:15):
Great. Thanks Ashan. Well we certainly will keep an eye out for that. And you mentioning the people transformation, the cultural shift as well, that's very important as part of the cloud native telco transformation. We must leave it there for now though, Ashan and Joel, good talking with you and thanks very much for helping to answer some of our most frequently asked viewer questions. And don't forget if you are watching this during our cloud native Telco summit, then please keep sending in your questions because we have a live q and a show later today. Goodbye for now.