The telecommunications industry has goals that seem contradictory: to innovate at high speed while keeping services stable and secure. To address this complexity, Vodafone Germany chose to leverage the power of the cloud and modernize its IT systems with the support of Amdocs Ltd., a provider of software and services for media and communication companies.

Vodafone Germany’s program establishes a modern cloud native technology architecture based on an agile and scalable IT delivery model, making processes faster and more efficient, according to Ralf Hellebrand (pictured, right), program director of technology at Vodafone Germany. The project earned the Best Telco Solution award from Amazon Web Services Inc. during the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards.

“We want to apply agile methods; we want to dismantle the Taylorism and the techniques around DevOps. Cloud operation, etc. … help us to do that,” Hellebrand said. “Now, while we are transforming our way of working, we don’t want to lose the good elements of what we have been doing before; we want to do a step forward and not at the same time a step back.”

Hellebrand and Avishai Sharlin (pictured, left), division president of technology, network and products at Amdocs, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They discussed the technology challenges facing Vodafone Germany and the entire telco industry, how the company is working collaboratively with Amdocs to address these issues, and how IT modernization will enable the business to achieve continuous innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboration changes the game

Collaboration is the cornerstone of the program developed by Amdocs for Vodafone Germany. The program works on short collaboration cycles through DevOps teams, allowing companies to experiment and verify user feedback.

“Unlike many previous experiences, this time we understood that success [is] equal to us working hand in hand together, making sure that we overcome and achieve everything as true partners,” Sharlin said. “So, the greatest obstacles and also the biggest achievement were done together as one team.”

This approach allows the companies to detect issues early in the process and resolve them faster. With a high level of transparency, the teams put everything on the table to find the best way to address the issues.

“We work collaborative on the solution, and that’s really kind of new to the industry we are working in, and that’s kind of game changing for it,” Hellebrand said. “At the beginning, we said it will be game changing if it works. Now, we see that it does.”

Automation ensures agile development

Another fundamental characteristic of the program is the DevOps approach, which establishes a culture of shared responsibility, ensures faster time-to-market and rapid response to change, and improves production stability and software quality. In line with that comes automation.

“Automation is a key fundamental element in the end-to-end journey of such a big transformation, especially if you’re going into agile development and you need to fail fast, react fast, change fast, and then continue onwards with a new solution,” Sharlin explained.

With this feature, Vodafone Germany is able to create complete environments with a single click and implement changes in test and production via CI/CD pipelines. It also redefine its operations, moving from being reactive when dealing with incidents to being proactive. This is achieved through self-healing capabilities and ability to roll out change to production safely using release on-demand and canary releases.

“Automation helps us to focus on the real problems and not on the things you can automate by technology,” Hellebrand stated.

Many AWS tools gain space in the program

The AWS Well-Architected framework and managed technologies are some of the main tools leveraged by Vodafone Germany’s solution. It uses AWS services like RDS, EKS, EMR and MSK to improve operational management; AWS Spot instances and AWS Lambda to reduce cost of environments; and AWS CloudWatch for strategic monitoring and logging.

The collaboration with AWS appears in other forms as well, according to Sharlin.

“From an Amdocs perspective … we have a unique technology which defines an end-to-end solution to development within a microservice cloud native environment; we’ll call it MS360, [and] AWS assisted a lot in making this a mature technology and allowing us to develop faster and fully utilize the benefits of cloud native environments,” he explained.

With all of these tools together, the program aims to enable continuous innovation. When an idea is developed, it is possible to implement it quickly through a pilot, learn from the pilot and drive forward.

“[The program] is evolving step by step, and it’s bringing benefits step by step, so the benefits are already in place to a certain extent, and they’re constantly growing,” Hellebrand concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE