Communications service provider Amdocs adopts Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes

Amdocs’ mission is to deliver business improvements that create growth for its communications and media customers. As these industries become more dynamic, Amdocs sought to become faster and more agile in its service development approach. By building key new OSS/BSS applications as microservices running on Kubernetes containers Red Hat OpenShift, the company can deliver new features and services to market faster, as well as transform its entire development culture to focus on open, efficient work.

Benefits:

• Reduced time to market to meet changing consumer demand and create competitive edge with dynamic, efficient development approach
• Achieved greater infrastructure freedom with choice of cloud environments
• Eliminated downtime for end customers with access to expert support 

Amdocs, a software and services provider to telecommunications and media companies, helps accelerate the industry’s dynamic digital transformation by delivering business improvements that create growth. Amdocs has long-term business relationships with 350 communications and media providers, and technology service and distribution ties to 600 media creators.

To keep pace with consumer expectations for increasingly fast services in these evolving industries, Amdocs itself needed to transform. The company sought to improve the flexibility and agility of its critical OSS/BSS solutions, used by communications service providers (CSPs) to support ongoing development of innovative new services.

“Given the presence of cloud-native, microservices architecture in telcos, we have to modernize our engagement applications to make them cloud-native and microservices-based¹,”said Cedric Gegout, Head of Technical Product Management at Amdocs.

To accomplish this change, Amdocs sought an agile, flexible application platform to serve as the foundation for its transformation project, Microservices360. “We want to build our new core applications as microservices. That shift will help our customers move faster and get better scalability and elasticity for running their applications—for example, when adapting to the launch of a new iPhone model,” said Cedric Gegout.

As a long-time customer of Red Hat—including integrating Red Hat OpenStack^® Platform as the cloud foundation of its Network Cloud Service Orchestrator offering—Amdocs quickly chose Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the application platform for its transformation efforts.

“Over the years, we’ve built a trusted relationship with Red Hat. After a detailed proof of concept, it was clear Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform has all the right technologies to meet our CI/CD [continuous integration and delivery] requirements, as well as the production quality expected by the top CSPs,” says Cedric Gegout. “In addition, cloud portability, a strong roadmap, and access on-going support for open source technologies created a compelling business case.”

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a comprehensive, Kubernetes-based enterprise open source application platform. Thanks to OpenShift, Amdocs has established a unified, automated CI/CD platform—the core of its Microservices360 project—to containerize and centrally manage its cloud native products, as well as flexibly deploy them in any cloud or on-premise environments.

All new Amdocs products are now being developed to be cloud-native in a microservices-based architecture. More than 6,000 Amdocs developers and testers from its development and delivery teams use the platform to speed and simplify their work. As of late 2018, Amdocs now has 30 clusters and 2,000 cores in its product development environment running on Red Hat OpenShift, figures that it expects to triple by the end of 2019.

“This has been one of our most successful projects in our development transformation, largely due to how tightly integrated OpenShift is with Kubernetes,” said Cedric Gegout.

Faster time to market

As the telecommunications and media industries move from annual to monthly releases, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps Amdocs match this changing cadence at scale.

By containerizing its existing applications, automating repetitive tasks, and introducing a microservices approach, the company has reduced the manual work needed to test new code, shortening release cycles and improving code quality. Developers can focus on writing functional code, while security, monitoring, and logging are managed by Microservices360.

“Using Red Hat OpenShift has increased our business agility,” said Cedric Gegout. “We can now change a few functions according to business needs without affecting the reliability or availability of an entire system.”

Faster platform performance and more efficient development is changing the perception of Amdocs in the market—and creating a competitive advantage for both the company and its customers.

“Amdocs is now ahead of the market in using microservices capabilities to help our customers get their new services to market faster,” said Cedric Gegout.

More flexible infrastructure

With Red Hat OpenShift, Amdocs applications can now move between infrastructures, giving customers more freedom—and preventing vendor lock-in.

“We recognize that each customer has different needs and requirements. Many of our customer have legacy environments but are moving to the cloud. Our microservices-based applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure: public, private, or on-premise,” said Cedric Gegout.

OpenShift also provides standard development tools, including Kubernetes and Jenkins, and a unified, user-friendly interface, to simplify development and deployment for Amdocs’ customers, no matter their environment.

Expert open source support

For Amdocs’ customers, providing telecommunications services to millions of customers worldwide, operational availability is critical. Amdocs works closely with Red Hat support—including regular technical meetings with the architecture teams—as well as a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) to ensure optimal performance of its OpenShift production environment.

“We know we have end-to-end support with Red Hat,” said Cedric Gegout. “We can pick up the phone, any time, to do an analysis of root causes and quickly resolve any issues. On average, we have one of these calls each month, but working with Red Hat’s support means these issues never affect our end customers.”

Successful adoption of an open source application platform has had an ongoing effect on Amdocs’ approach to business.

“We’ve embraced an open source philosophy. Red Hat OpenShift is very well aligned and contributes to our reputation of being solid and dependable but also innovative and open,” said Cedric Gegout.

“The success of the OpenShift project has encouraged further contributions to open initiatives, where new functionality from different parts of the company is merged into our core products and services. We’ve created a focus on innovation and standardization in everything we do that will continue to drive our business.”