CNF continuous delivery

This step consists of a sequence of steps that are carried out repeatedly to deploy changes that are part of container/configuration changes resulting in upgrades. The CNF continuous delivery is automated via pipelines and is specific to individual applications. AWS uses standard Helm charts to update specific CNFs. The code pipeline has pre- and post-checks for the application update status. The updated CI/CD pipeline is also integrated with a test automation framework to run automated testing. This abstraction allows a clean deployment of network functions.

CNF continuous delivery and deployment can be broadly classified into the following categories:

• Application upgrades — Most application upgrades are changes within the Kuberbetes application PODs. These updates can be applied automatically through the code pipeline. Most CNFs support in-place upgrades by providing multiple instances of application PODs. Multiple instances allow a rolling upgrade approach. Not all application POD changes support Helm upgrade. Pipelines take these variations into account and use Helm install/delete as required.

• Major upgrades — Major upgrades are primarily database schema changes. This change cannot be applied without causing some downtime. The standard approach to these changes is to delete the application and re-create the relevant pods. During the process the application may not be available. The following tools are used for upgrades:

Canary deployment