‘Digital Transformation’ and ‘Cloud Strategy’ have become common discussion topics for most companies and leaders in the tech fields in recent years. Especially in Government, Banking and Telecommunication sectors, it seems an unimaginable task to fully transition into digital. Even though most companies have initiated digital transformation processes at different levels of the organisation, only a few have truly excelled in the transition to digital. In present times, COVID-19 has urged business models to transition into digital and has seen the necessity for this to occur in order to win in the post COVID era. Wavenet is no exception to this, and has seen the launch of platforms such as ahasa® that offers on-demand availability of digital solutions for CSPs and telecommunication businesses. Before discussing more about the Ahasa platform, let’s take a quick look at digital transformation itself.
While digital transformation has multiple definitions, its essential function is to ‘changing the way how business is done digitally. Doing business digitally requires less investment when developing and installing software to improve operations. A digital Cloud platform offers cost efficiencies, increased collaboration, scalability, and data recovery. These are also some of the benefits of Wavenet’s Cloud-based platform.
So, why do we need to change the way we do business in the first place? Well, one reason is to acquire more customers and increase satisfaction for existing customers. Business is an economic activity, where we sell products or serve services to receive money, and hence customers are the recipients of our products or services. The challenge is not only to connect the business to a customer’s needs digitally but to do so, with innovation that adds value to customers as well as the business offering.
When we focus on Cloud strategy, selecting the right engineering tools is a vital decision to reduce operational cost and time. Otherwise, we may find ourselves spending unnecessary time and money trying to fix technical issues, rather than focusing on creating value for our customers.
Ahasa as a Platform
Ahasa is a Cloud-based platform that allows you to integrate and operate containerized applications using Kubernetes. The advanced orchestration functionality along with CICD pipelines inside the Cloud infrastructure allows continuous independent deliveries for customers using Kubernetes. The platform assists businesses to select the right tools such as Kubernetes, CICD pipeline, better deployment strategies and, use TM Forum’s Open APIs and focus on their innovations when creating solutions.
Kubernetes as a Deployment Environment
Wavenet’s Ahasa works on individual customer deployments (using Kubernetes Cluster) in Public or Private Cloud. The overarching Cloud-based platform is a master repo of all Wavenet artifacts. The artifacts are essential, containerized microservice. Each service communicates through standard APIs and standard protocols.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
With Ahasa, the containerized artifacts are continuously integrated using code pipelines and the platform will consume the artifacts using Continuous Delivery pipeline to ensure business needs are met, delivering quality products with frequency and predictably, automatically from test to staging and from staging to production stages.
Each deployment inside the Cloud-based platform will have staging and production environments. Staging environments will be delivered continuously with the latest versions of the microservices or the artifacts.
Standard Open APIs
Each service communicates through standard TM Forum APIs and standard protocols. Which brings auto-discovery of APIs among the components.
Blue Green Deployment Pattern
Ahasa supports standard production deployment patterns such as Blue Green, Rolling Updates and Canary Releases, etc.
The Staging (Green) environment is deployed with the latest version of the solution with sufficient time to test the new version before applying it to Production (Blue). The production environment can be seamlessly upgraded to the new version by switching traffic from production (Blue) to staging (Green) status. Rolling back to the previous version also becomes seamless by switching the traffic back to production (Blue).
Opening Paths for Innovation
Wavenet Cloud enables CSPs and communication organisations, a platform for trialing innovative ideas by extending/integrating multiple Wavenet products and solutions since Wavenet products are developed exposing standard APIs and protocols.
