“Fundamentally, GitOps is a process; not a product or even a specific set of products.”

Telecom has been on a (slow!) path toward autonomous networking and software/hardware disaggregation for more than a decade, spurred by the invention of SDN followed by the proposal of Network Function Virtualization in 2012. Subsequent innovations, from closed loops to intent, have taken further steps toward the same thing: autonomous control loops applied to telecom functions, networks, and services.

GitOps represents another essential innovation (admittedly borrowed from enterprise IT) on the road to autonomous and software-ized networks, especially applicable for cloudified 5G RAN, where agility and scale seem like an either/or choice. GitOps utilizes Git software repositories (e.g.: GitHub, GitLab), along with a set of tools, to enable the automated distribution and instantiation of cloudified network functions, thus enabling affordable scale.

In this extensive research note, we explore the practical reality of GitOps in a telecom network context, considering the implications for other functions such as testing, orchestration.