Case Study: China Unicom boosts efficiency and lowers IT costs with Kubernetes

How China Unicom Leveraged Kubernetes to Boost Efficiency and Lower IT Costs

China Unicom, one of China’s top three telecom operators, needed a better way to run hundreds of applications across multiple data centers serving more than 300 million users. Although it was already using Docker with VMware and OpenStack infrastructure, resource utilization was low and the company lacked a cloud platform for its growing application portfolio. Kubernetes was chosen as the open source orchestration platform to support this transformation.

With Kubernetes, China Unicom built a cloud platform that now hosts 50 microservices and supports all new development. The result was a 20-50% increase in resource utilization, lower IT infrastructure costs, and deployment times reduced from a couple of hours to just 5-10 minutes. Kubernetes also improved operational efficiency through self-healing and scalability, enabling China Unicom to manage multiple systems with only five people.

China Unicom

Chengyu Zhang

Group Leader of Platform Technology R&D