Accenture joined AT&T‘s Microservices Supplier Program in an effort to help enterprises migrate legacy operations to models using DevOps and microservices. The move doubles the program’s number of partners.
Accenture will bring its consulting expertise to the multi-year project. Together, the companies are working toward developing microservices that enterprises will use to order AT&T products and services. These will include fiber and security services.
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“When you build an enterprise app with individual ‘blocks’ or microservices, it’s easier to upgrade, replace, or reorganize the functions within the application,” explained Pam Parisian, president of technology development at AT&T, in a blog post. She added that this will also allow AT&T to combine microservices into specific, tailored products and services for customers.
AT&T launched the program last October with IBM as its initial partner. The duo focused their efforts on designing, developing, and deploying microservices for AT&T’s backend processes.
Parisian said AT&T deployed more than 300 microservices at the end of last year. Those microservices contributed to an approximately 30 percent improvement in the speed to market on projects AT&T started in 2017.
Big on Small
Melissa Arnoldi, president of technology and operations at AT&T, late last year cited microservices as one of “five pillars” that the telecom giant views as key to its network evolution. The others include 5G, software-defined networking (SDN), data insights, and security.
Arnoldi told attendees at AT&T’s Business Summit event in Dallas that microservices were the future of software development, and many of the company’s own platforms would be built using the architecture.
That architecture builds applications using independent services designed to work together instead of legacy systems that were built from a single, monolithic architecture. The independent services support specific business functions and can ideally be re-used across platforms.
AT&T is currently using a microservices architecture for its Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), which it calls the “brains” of its SDN operations.
Arnoldi said AT&T was looking at migrating the more than 2,200 applications in the company’s IT system to a microservices architecture to “create more agility, speed, and scalability.”
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