Turkcell’s Unified Telco Cloud with Red Hat is Future-Ready

Turkcell was an early adopter of network function virtualization (NFV) to get digital services to market faster. To do so, Turkcell chose open source for vendor agnosticism and the efficiency of a common platform by building its Unified Telco Cloud on Red Hat OpenStack Platform Now, Turkcell is continuing this journey by implementing microservices, containerization and zero-touch provisioning with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to enable the rapid rollout of cloud-native applications and to host multi-vendor network functions more easily. 

Following a successful trial, Turkcell is now moving its network functions into production on Red Hat OpenShift, starting with the most important IMS workloads and preparing to implement mission-critical 5G core workloads. Turkcell is looking for opportunities to extend its core capabilities to the edge, namely to the radio access network (RAN). Currently, the Red Hat OpenShift-based platform efficiently manages traffic volumes exceeding 15 terabits per second (Tbps). 

Faster services delivery 

Advanced automation is needed to manage today’s mission-critical networks with ever expanding, highly distributed network functions requiring ongoing updates. To achieve this, Turkcell is making use of:

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes for policy-based governance and lifecycle management of its applications and network functions at scale, including the capabilities for continuous integration, delivery and testing;
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for consistent and reliable automation across network domains including out to the edge, eliminating a considerable amount of manual intervention and physical time on site. 

With this, Turkcell has now activated zero-touch provisioning, enabling it to shorten deployment times; it can now create a workload cluster for a new environment from scratch within a few hours compared to the week it took before. This makes it easier to manage thousands of distributed sites and network functions, reduces costs and accelerates time to market. 

Partnering for success 

Turkcell tapped Odine’s expertise in telco cloud transformation and automation to optimize its modernization journey and take advantage of existing technology investment. Odine’s extensive experience in virtualization and network transformation helps Turkcell to deploy cloud-native solutions more efficiently and scale its infrastructure dynamically. In collaboration with Red Hat and Odine, Turkcell can benefit from rapid open source innovation in the cloud-native world while depending on carrier-grade stability, support and security features. 

Red Hat’s large ecosystem of integrated, certified solution providers is a key factor in helping Turkcell achieve the high capacity needed to host over 24 million subscribers on its cloud platform. Red Hat is supporting Turkcell in onboarding network functions from a variety of suppliers with the desired cloud-native specifications and security features. This gives Turkcell greater freedom of choice and helps boost supplier competition, leading to reduced costs. 

Responsive, sustainable innovation

Having a robust and agile common platform for Turkcell’s network has improved time to market by over 50%. It enables more frequent releases of cloud network functions, including security- or bug-related updates, which helps reduce the attack surface and increase resilience. The flexibility of Turkcell’s Unified Telco Cloud enables consistent delivery of data and voice services for higher quality customer experiences in 5G and beyond. Red Hat OpenShift can seamlessly extend Turkcell’s applications out to the edge, namely the RAN, alongside end users or data sources.  

Turkcell’s telco cloud team aims to design digital solutions and services that are simple, reliable and sustainable for its customers. Flexibility and scalability means that it can carry out lifecycle management such as automatic upgrades without interrupting service delivery. Turkcell can also optimize energy efficiency by using only the resources needed.  

Connecting people in times of need

Having a stable, reliable platform with automation capabilities enables Turkcell to reduce service outages and improve disaster recovery around events, where the capacitive need can increase many times over. Turkcell is also using artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based assurance monitoring for its common platform to support infrastructure continuity, especially in disaster scenarios. 

With this modernization in collaboration with Red Hat, Turkcell is delivering on its mission to provide superior digital services for a better future for people and business.