Scaling automated infrastructure compliance in telecommunications using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

As telecommunications (telco) mobile networks evolve from physical hardware to virtualized and containerized infrastructure, the volume of necessary network element upgrades has increased exponentially. For Telstra, Australia’s leading telco and technology company, this shift makes traditional manual network configuration unsustainable.

To support a connected future, Telstra needed to move beyond manual intervention and embrace a strategy where the network could manage, protect, and optimize itself. Telstra modernized its approach by transitioning to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, shifting from monolithic playbooks to a modular, reusable automation architecture.

Accelerating time to market

One of the most significant initial use cases for Telstra’s automation investment was the rollout of their Wireless VPN product for Enterprise Customers. Previously, deploying this product required manual coordination of production changes across 6 different types of core network nodes, leading to customer wait times.

By introducing Ansible Automation Platform, Telstra drastically eliminated this bottleneck. In this automation implementation, Telstra follows several change controls and enables all network node changes within just 1 to 2 days. Not only did this provide immediate value to the customer, but it also established a highly valuable, reusable pattern that Telstra could use for future product releases, indirectly adding long-term business value.

Ensuring proactive network health and "realignment"

To ensure the network is operating smoothly and customer orders aren't impacted by maintenance, Telstra relies heavily on Ansible Automation Platform for configuration management and visibility:

• Daily health checks: Every morning, automation runs a sweep across all network nodes to proactively identify issues, such as wiped accounts or unhealthy nodes, before they can disrupt a customer order later in the day.
• Configuration realignment: When a network node is temporarily taken offline for upgrades or maintenance, Telstra uses Ansible Automation Platform to automatically reconcile configurations prior to reintroduction. This realignment ensures that once the node comes back online, customer orders processing continues without interruption.

Unlocking the power of Event-Driven Ansible

To make their autonomous network ambitions more practical, Telstra implemented Event-Driven Ansible to tackle a recurring 5G core alert that was constantly interrupting staff via PagerDuty. Not only did this interruption require staff to be pulled away from their existing activities, but they were also subject to context switching - slowing progress and innovation. 

By linking PagerDuty webhooks to Event-Driven Ansible, Telstra created a rulebook to automatically address the specific event signature and perform read-only health checks. This workflow also generates a formatted CSV file specifically tailored for the Radio Access Network (RAN) team's internal tools, improving end-to-end efficiency across different departments. By automating this seemingly small operational issue, Telstra saved one individual approximately 24 hours (or 3 working days) per month, drastically reducing context switching.

The value of Ansible Automation Platform

Ansible Automation Platform has delivered 3 massive pillars of value for Telstra's operations:

1. End-to-end coordination: It coordinates changes across different teams responsible for specific node types, solving the complexity of manual, cross-team coordination.
2. Standardized execution environments: It eliminates the classic "it works on my laptop" problem. By providing standardized execution environments, Telstra ensures that automation playbooks work consistently for everyone across the organization.
3. Safeguarded workflows: Telstra wraps its network API interfaces in managed Ansible workflows equipped with critical safety checkpoints. And if the node configuration post-checks fail, the team is made aware immediately of an issue after the automated change. 

Looking to the future: AIOps and security

The team is actively exploring the use of generative AI via automation intelligent assistant. Telstra sees a massive opportunity for AI to manage the lifecycle of playbooks—specifically, automatically fixing playbooks that break during platform upgrades, which currently consumes a significant amount of engineering time. Because of Telstra's strict regulatory compliance obligations, keeping these AI models localized and secure within their on-premise environment is a top priority. 

Telstra’s automation journey proves that moving away from manual hybrid cloud management and fragmented scripts toward a unified, enterprise-grade platform is no longer just an IT upgrade: It’s a mission-critical business enabler that speeds up delivery, offers reliability, and fosters collaboration across teams.

Ready to begin your automation journey? Discover how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help your teams orchestrate critical workflows, scale across hybrid cloud environments, and build a resilient foundation for AI.