DT looks to share its cloud-native enterprise integration platform

Adopting a decoupled, cloud-native microservice architecture can bring multiple benefits including greater scalability, agility and the ability to speed up innovation. But it’s not a simple change that happens overnight. Telcos and other large enterprises typically have to connect new microservices to legacy software systems, which can create system integration headaches.

Deutsche Telekom has come up with a solution that it hopes will be deployed not only by other telcos, but also large enterprises in other sectors. And it is modelled on TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA).

“We have open sourced the core of the decoupling and integration layer of Deutsche Telekom IT,” explains Christopher Braun, Product Manager Integration Platform and IT Architect for the company. “It's highly scalable … and fits with the execution environment of the ODA Canvas.” Read this ebook to learn more about the ODA Canvas.

“It is quite an obvious challenge that you can’t get rid of legacy in a fast-paced manner, meaning you have to interconnect public clouds and all of the hundreds or thousands of microservices you're building … with legacy systems,” says Braun. “And maybe you are not only on one public cloud. Maybe you have several hyperscalers that provide an environment to you.”

Called Open Telekom Integration Platform, Deutsche Telekom’s open-source, cloud-native integration platform supports a multi-cloud approach to managing the full API lifecycle, including security and the event-driven integration of services, fostering true loose coupling of the IT landscape, according to Braun. And it supports every aspect of the API lifecycle which consists of eight stages: define, design, test, deploy, observe, discover.

“It is deeply embedded in the platform's configuration mechanism that each API is assigned to the responsibility of a specified team. At the same time, automated linters [which are tools to improve code] and syntax validations guarantee conformance with API guidelines (e.g. TM Forum's Open API) as early as the design stage,” explains Braun. A large selection of tools such as Hoppscotch enables developers to test the designed APIs in non-production environments. "The deployment of an API is likewise facilitated by a declarative, CICD-compatible configuration that seamlessly ensures connectivity in parallel with the deployment of the actual applications," he adds. "A full LMT stack paired with self-service dashboards and alerts ensure the observability of all APIs. Every exposed API is listed in an API catalog and can be discovered by other teams in the company."

‘Predestined to be automated’

The need to securely interconnect systems that are on-premises and spread across multiple public clouds generates a series of regular, repetitive processes.

“You will immediately be faced with organizational issues regarding firewall clearances, IP address range harmonization and establishing connectivity links between all cloud providers. This needs to be done repeatedly for every connection between microservices, making it predestined to be automated,” says Braun.

The Open Telekom Integration Platform helps automate processes by providing decentralized gateways on the edges of public and private clouds or on-premise facilities. “This means you abstract away all of those nitty gritty firewall rules, all of the IP harmonizations,” explains Braun. “Because if you have a decentralized gateway on every cloud and every edge, then we are talking about shifting the whole configuration effort to the application layer … [and] providing the whole optimization so it is easy for a developer who is releasing a new microservice to also get the connectivity sorted out.”

Deutsche Telekom hosts the open-source platform on GitHub. Further, a GitOps approach is utilized to support automation. One of the advantages of GitOps is that it allows software developers to take a declarative approach to configuring software. That means the user simply defines what they want, and the platform delivers, without requiring a middleman.

Read this e-book to learn more about GitOps

A community effort

Hosting its decoupling and IT integration platform on GitHub brings several business benefits to Deutsche Telekom, notably by increasing deployment speed and innovation. “It is quite easy to roll it out to other [DT] European subsidiaries because it scales better... You do not have to have one big rollout team in Germany introducing that platform as closed source to all the other entities,” says Braun.

“Because it's a pull, and not a push, it helps to harmonize all of DT and other companies at scale … and it enables the open-source community to contribute back to Deutsche Telekom,” he adds.

Indeed, Deutsche Telekom hopes that other telcos will use and feed into the open-source platform, which is made possible by the overlap between its in-house architecture Magenta Canvas and TM Forum’s ODA Canvas.

“The ODA Canvas comes into play to harmonize the ODA components, [as well as] the communication and the consumption and exposure of APIs,” according to Braun. “We would also love to bring that to TM Forum as well as another implementation that may fit large enterprises” in other sectors.

Braun explains that although Deutsche Telekom expects other telcos to initially adopt and feed into the platform, it can be used by other enterprises because “it is a platform and not fused with the business domains of a telco”.

He adds: “For large enterprises … there is an organizational overhead linked to keeping track of all the integrations that comes from decoupling and the Open Telekom Integration Platform steps in to make the whole organization efficient.”