Japan’s top mobile operator, NTT Docomo has announced that it will build its new development environment Aladin on the Oracle cloud infrastructure (OCI).
Aladin - All Around Docomo Information Systems - is a mission-critical system that serves as Docomo’s customer hub.
The company said in a statement that Aladin’s 300 developers will build “modern applications in a faster and more cost-effective manner” using OCI.
“Docomo benefits from highly available and secure compute resources, as the company expands to broader telecommunications, internet and smart life services,” Tadaaki Yoshida, representing Docomo’s Information Systems Department, said.
Yoshida said Aladin handles all customer-related operations, such as membership and transactional data, credit checks, contract data and assignment of telephone numbers for Docomo’s more than 83 million subscriber base.
He said the company’s customer information is rapidly expanding alongside the mobile operator’s “d POINT CLUB” reward points program, growing numbers of traditional mobile phone subscribers, and new customer channels such as chatbots and smart devices.
“To meet this business expansion and enable faster delivery of better services, we are modernising the Aladin development environment by moving it to the cloud,” Yoshida said.
As part of this, Docomo has “built a new development environment on OCI to serve approximately 300 developers”.
Yoshida said this “supports development, coding, and integration testing".
"Its rollout has quickly proven how we can optimise our costs and improve developer productivity and efficiency through containerisation and automation," he said.
Yoshida added that each Docomo developer now has a dedicated environment and the “ability to flexibly change resources during peak and slow periods of development, eliminating the need to manually provision and shut down environments and providing the resources needed on-demand”.
He added that Docomo also used the Oracle container engine for Kubernetes (OKE) for containerisation, and plans to use continuous integration and continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) tools to further automate operational management.
Database
As part of the cloud migration, Docomo has also moved its on-premises Oracle database environment to the Oracle database cloud service on OCI.
This environment is used by database administrators from dedicated devices to verify and train database recovery procedures and conduct training, including the reproduction of failure conditions in an environment similar to the commercial environment, Yoshida said.
This has allowed, Yoshida said, Docomo to reduce costs by 95 percent by minimising the manual workload required for managing and operating the environment.
Docomo also aims to migrate its final operation testing environment, which is currently in an on-premises location, to the cloud, including Oracle Cloud, to further improve testing efficiency and application quality with flexible development and testing environments in the near future, Yoshida added.
