Case Study: Nokia achieves 5G DevOps agility with Kubernetes

Enabling 5G and DevOps at a Telecom Company with Kubernetes

Nokia, the telecommunications company based in Espoo, Finland, needed a way to deliver the same infrastructure software to operators running on very different environments, including bare metal, virtual machines, VMware Cloud, and OpenStack Cloud. As its network products support carrier-grade services with “five nines” availability, Nokia needed an approach that could handle strict reliability requirements while remaining portable across customer infrastructures. Kubernetes was used as the cloud native platform behind this effort, including the Nokia Telephony Application Server.

With **Kubernetes**, Nokia moved toward containerization and a microservices-based, infrastructure-agnostic architecture. This let teams separate the application layer from the infrastructure layer, improve early testing with the same binary artifact across environments, and avoid rerunning tests for each target platform. The result was faster releases, fewer dependencies, and a reported savings of several hundred hours in every release, while also enabling Nokia’s broader move into 5G and DevOps.

Nokia

Gergely Csatari

Senior Open Source Engineer