TelecomTV TelecomTV
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Events
  • Network Partners
  • Industry Insights
  • Directory
  • Newsletters
  • Open RAN
  • Digital Platforms and Services
  • 5G
  • Access Evolution
  • Private Networks
  • Cloud Native
  • Edge
  • Open Networking
  • Sustainability
  • AI, Analytics and Automation
  • 6G Research and Innovation
  • Security
  • More Topics
  • Network Partners
  • Industry Insights
  • Directory
  • Newsletters
  • |
  • About
  • Contact
  • |
  • Connect with us
  • 5G
  • 6G Research and Innovation
  • Access Evolution
  • AI, Analytics and Automation
  • Cloud Native
  • Digital Platforms and Services
  • Edge
  • Open Networking
  • Open RAN
  • Private Networks
  • Security
  • Sustainability
  • Connect with TelecomTV
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Sign In Register Subscribe
    • Subscribe
    • Sign In
    • Register
  • Search

Digital Platforms & Services

Digital Platforms & Services

Vodafone gains scale with a multi-cloud approach to R&D

Ray Le Maistre
By Ray Le Maistre

Oct 21, 2021

Scott Petty, Director of Digital & IT, Vodafone

Scott Petty, Director of Digital & IT, Vodafone

  • Vodafone’s Director of Digital & IT Scott Petty uses multiple cloud for his R&D
  • Mix of private and public cloud suits the operator’s development and digital platform needs
  • Developers are working on a common ‘Telco-as-a-Service’ platform

Vodafone has revamped its internal digital development and IT operations to become more efficient, effective and “cloud native,” according to the operator’s Director of Digital & IT, Scott Petty, who has outlined how the operator has adopted a hybrid and multi-cloud approach to its digital development processes.

Talking during a media briefing in London following the announcement that Vodafone is to add 7,000 additional software developers to its pan-European R&D team, Petty talked about an approach dubbed “OneSource,” which is built on open source concepts of open platforms, to which developers contribute capabilities, take capabilities from, and are able to contribute and build software that is used throughout our environment,” said the Vodafone man.

And to help that process, Vodafone has invested in a “common infrastructure platform – internally we call it TaaS, or Telco-as-a-Service – a common cloud-native infrastructure platform that all about developers use to build all of their infrastructure, automate their code, write feature capabilities and contribute that to a set of code repositories that can be used by other developers inside Vodafone,” noted Petty.  

He says those cloud-native capabilities are suitable for both private and public cloud processes, and he says the use of public cloud platforms is critical to achieving scale.

“Why would we want to use public cloud services? iPhone launch day is a great example. This year we had 400% more traffic than we had last year, and for a week of the year, we have more than 15 times the traffic we have for the rest of the year. To be successful during that launch period, leveraging public cloud auto-scaling capabilities for that peak... makes a lot more sense than buying our own infrastructure in our own data centres that would sit idle for large periods of time. So a cloud-native strategy that lets us move traffic from our data centres to public cloud data centres is really important.”

But the hybrid approach to cloud is also important. “Of course, we have regulatory requirements, and there will always be infrastructure, particularly in our core networks or maybe for security-related applications... that we need to run in our own data centres and TaaS manages the interfaces between those, and allows us to choose different cloud providers. You may have seen that we've partnered heavily with AWS for many capabilities – we use AWS for infrastructure scaling – but we use GCP [Google Cloud Platform] for analytics, and we've done a lot of market-leading development around analytics with GCP. And we also use Microsoft Azure for a range of services as well. 

That multi-cloud approach “is really important as we scale our platform – we'll be able to launch services in each one of those environments.” 

In addition, Petty says the operator has “standardised our tooling capabilities and our engineering development capabilities to improve the way our engineers can manage those capabilities and that has started to deliver real benefits both in terms of throughput in implementing our platform – we've seen a 40% increase in developer throughput.”

That’s an unusual measure, but Petty says that can be quantified by taking a “squad of 10 developers and measuring how many ‘story points’ they can develop on each sprint – a sprint usually runs for two weeks – and you can measure how many go in and how many come out the other end. We've seen a 40% improvement in those moving to a common platform,” he noted.  “The quality has also gone up, by 30%, during that period because we've automated more of the main daily tasks related to software development, we’ve automated testing – developers write their own test scripts and validate the capabilities that go into production – and that's given us big increases in availability.” 

And there’s more... Petty says Vodafone is also building a “set of shared and integrated services, or what we call a tenant model, allowing us to build new capabilities and services that sit on top of the common infrastructure layer which share common underlying components, for identity management, for data analytics, for integration. One of those tenants is ‘network-as-a-platform,’ where we take an entire network layer and expose that as a set of microservices and APIs, leveraging that underlying component... we’re doing the same with our IoT platforms and our other applications. So we create an entire software ecosystem with our own engineers, managing both the digital channels that we build, but also the network applications that we build,” explains Petty. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV

Related Topics
  • AI, Analytics & Automation ,
  • Analysis & Opinion,
  • Cloud,
  • Cloud Native,
  • Digital Platforms & Services,
  • Europe,
  • Internet of Things,
  • News,
  • Telco & CSP,
  • Vodafone

More Like This

Security

NetNumber Announces Formation Of Two New Dynamic Companies: Acquisition By Abry Partners Launches NetNumber Global Data Services, Spin-Out Of Software Line Forms Titanium Software

Jul 6, 2022

Security

What’s up with… Netnumber, Adtran and ADVA, TIM

Jul 6, 2022

Digital Platforms & Services

Andre Fuetsch to be replaced as AT&T’s CTO – sources

Jul 6, 2022

AI, Analytics & Automation

Vodafone builds on its Google Cloud relationship with AI Booster

Jul 6, 2022

Open RAN

Open RAN will have major impact on RAN intelligence: AT&T scientist

Jul 5, 2022

Email Newsletters

Stay up to date with the latest industry developments: sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox – including our daily news briefing and weekly wrap.

Subscribe

Top Picks

Highlights of our content from across TelecomTV today

10:14

Executive Interview: Vodafone’s Lucia De Miguel Albertos on the ultimate RAN Intelligent Controller

39:34

Figuring out the TCO of Open RAN

13:55

Vodafone and Juniper on the Importance of the RIC to Open RAN

4:24

Executive Interview: Neil McRae on BT's Open RAN Plans

TelecomTV
Company
  • About Us
  • Media Kit
  • Contact Us
Our Brands
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • Great Telco Debate
  • TelecomTV Events
Get In Touch
[email protected]
+44 (0) 207 448 1070
Connect With Us
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • Terms of Use
  • Legal Notices
  • Help

TelecomTV is produced by the team at Decisive Media.

© Decisive Media Limited 2022. All rights reserved. All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder(s).