Transforming the Core to Accelerate Digital Transformation of Türk Telekom

CONTEXT

Overview

Türk Telekom, with 179 years of history, is the first integrated telecommunications operator in Turkey. Having a wide service network and product range in the fields of individual and corporate services, Türk Telekom unified its mobile, internet, phone and TV products and services under the single “Türk Telekom” brand as of January 2016.

Following this, with the vision for leading digital transformation in Turkey, Türk Telekom increasingly focused on the elimination of technical and operational complexities and rationalization of IT landscape. The middleware platform, which is at the core of Türk Telekom IT, was an important focus area.

After careful analysis around Fixed Middleware modules, a rigorous technology initiative is defined, which aims to consolidate and update outdated and unsupported versions of the hardware and software platforms. This initiative paved the way for a future-ready platform based on Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c stack. Platform adhered to TM Forum’s best practices and global standards such as eTOM and SID.

Türk Telekom vision of introducing new technologies to Turkey and accelerating the country’s transformation into an information society is now supported and accelerated by a transformed Fixed Middleware domain, which is processing 14 million daily transactions through 900+ services and 300+ business processes and managing the processes for more than 14.6 million fixed subscribers.

Scope

The existing Türk Telekom Fixed Middleware platform contained 2 distinct platforms, each having multiple layers as follows:

1. aTTIP (Advanced Türk Telekom Integration Platform), having

• 2 Service Bus layers: OSB 11gR3, optimized for high throughput around synchronous flows, and another OSB 11gR3 tuned for asynchronous flows.
• 1 Orchestration layer, SOA Suite 11g (11.1.1.7)
• 1 Transport layer, JMS — WebLogic 11gR3

2. TTO (Türk Telekom Orchestration), having

• 2 Service Bus layers, OSB 10gR3 and OSB 11gR3
• 3 Orchestration layers; SOA Suite 11g (11.1.1.2), SOA Suite 11g (11.1.1.6), SOA Suite 11g (11.1.1.7)

Below picture depicts the existing landscape:

Figure 1 — Fixed Middleware Existing Platform Layers

The Fixed Middleware Upgrade and Remediation Project was planned to upgrade all outdated Service Bus and Orchestration domains within the aTTIP and TTO platforms to the latest version of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c product family. The project contained activities around:

• Upgrading Service Bus and SOA domains of aTTIP
• Consolidating and Upgrading Service Bus and SOA domains of TTO
• Upgrading JMS domains of aTTIP

As a result, around 900 services running on Oracle Service Bus and 300 composites running on Oracle SOA Suite are planned to run on the upgraded version.

Below picture depicts the target state:

Figure 2 — Fixed Middleware Target State Platform Layers

Objectives

The primary focus of Fixed Middleware Upgrade and Remediation Project was to modernize Türk Telekom’s Fixed Middleware platform by:

Replacing all outdated software and hardware: The platform was planned to be enhanced both in terms of software and hardware. Only the latest stable versions of Fusion Middleware stack needed to be used for the target state architecture and modern hardware was planned to be utilized for new binaries to enable better performance and efficiency.

Creating a rationalized middleware architecture: Services were required to be consolidated under a single version of Oracle Service Bus 12c, instead of the existing state where aTTIP OSB domains running on 11g, and both 10g and 11g OSB versions co-existed for TTO. Similarly, instead of running on 11g for aTTIP and 11.1.1.2, 11.1.1.6 and 11.1.1.7 for TTO all business processes were needed to be consolidated under SOA 12c.

Introducing new native features: Fusion Middleware 12c provides enhanced capabilities that were not possible out of the box in the previous versions. The project targeted to enable and utilize some of these native features.

• OSB 12c: Implementation with JDeveloper, Integrated OSB Server in JDeveloper, Pipeline Templates, Monitoring of OSB via Enterprise Manager, Dynamic Monitoring Service(DMS), OSB Instance Tracking, Dynamic Validation, Dynamic Replace, Shared Variables, Stage Disable/Enable in Pipeline, Custom Authentication for Business Service, nXSD Action, Service Callout with Attachments, MDS Support for OSB, OWSM Custom Assertions Support, Resequencing Support, Full DVM and Cross References Support, Enterprise Scheduler Service Support, Lazy Loading, New Adapters such as Coherence Adapter, REST Adapter, LDAP Adapter, SAP Adapter, Socket Adapter )
• SOA 12c: Cloud Integration, Native REST/JSON Support, Template Support ( Project Template, Component Template, Custom Activity Template), Visual Debugger, New Adapters ( Cloud Adapter, SAP R/3 Adapter, Coherence Adapter, MSMQ Adapter, Scheduled Activation and De-activation, nXSD Support, XQuery Mapper, Maven Plugin, Encryption/Decryption Personally-Identifiable Info (PII), Start-up Acceleration Through Lazy Loading

Decommissioning unused components: Access Logs, Custom Logs, Reports, SOAINFRA tables and Custom Tables, as well as their dependencies, were needed to be analyzed for the identification of any unused services, and accordingly simplification of the target solution.

Artifact consolidation and refactoring: In case there are multiple versions of the same technical artifact (WSDL / XSD / Proxy / Business Service / Service Account etc.), project also aimed to identify and then consolidate them accordingly.

ROLE OF DEFINEX

DefineX was responsible for the end-to-end delivery of the project. This included analysis and design of the new technology architecture, installation and configuration of new environments from scratch, upgrading and testing of all 900+ services and 300+ composites, deployment of the platform and post-production support of it.

Two-tier Delivery Model

DefineX structured the project team as follows:

The on-site team in Istanbul at Türk Telekom premises, consisting of middleware experts with both functional and architectural skills. This team was responsible for the analysis and design activities, project management, and all client-facing activities.

The near-shore team in DefineX’ s Izmir Delivery Center, consisting of local developers and integration experts. This team was responsible for the development activities. DefineX used the flexibility of scaling number of developers up and down during different phases of the project in line with the project needs.

DefineX Delivery Approach

During planning, considering the technical complexity of the project, DefineX defined 2 important guidelines. Upgrade Strategy and Iterative Delivery, which became the main pillars of the successful delivery of the project.

a- Upgrade Strategy

While planning the upgrade, choosing the right approach is a fundamental decision. Typically, one of two main approaches is followed: “In-place” and “Side-by-side”:

• In the In-place upgrade approach, a new Oracle home needs to be installed and both domain and DB are upgraded in-place. All resources (services and composites) should sustain in the upgraded domain.
• In the Side-by-side upgrade approach, a new Oracle home needs to be installed and a new 12c domain and new DB instance need to be created also. A new complete 12c domain configuration needs to be done. Subsequently, all services and composites must be re-built in 12c IDE (JDeveloper) and deployed to the new domain. Finally, redirection should be done from 11g to 12c.

There are various advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. The method to apply is decided by weighting few important criteria such as stability of the existing version(s) of the product, the necessity of keeping instance history, status of the long-running processes, minimum service downtime requirement, etc. After careful analysis, Side-by-Side approach is selected.

In order to mitigate the risk further, for both OSB and SOA upgrade process, DefineX leveraged flexibility provided by Load Balancers within the topology. In case an issue is observed for a specific service during the upgrade, with Load Balancer policies for context routing, partial rollbacks are performed (note that complete rollback would possibly be inevitable in case of an in-place upgrade). Leveraging on Load Balancer context-routing policies also prevented consumer application dependency for synchronous services.

b- Iterative Delivery

Instead of a big bang approach (go-live for all the services and composites simultaneously), a phased approach has been favored in order to mitigate risks, make a smoother transition to the new domain and realize benefits early incrementally.

One of the main points to handle during a side-by-side upgrade is the Business As Usual, i.e. managing technical dependencies with on-going business requirements coming from other running projects. Using an iterative methodology provided the flexibility of re-arranging chunk content considering conflicting resources, and as a result, unnecessary development effort on both versions is minimized. Here, existing service inventory with functional dependencies was also leveraged in the definition of chunk scopes.

Figure 3 — Phasing Approach

Using this phasing approach, all services were grouped under chunks. A total of 10 chunks were identified. Using the flexibility of the Iterative Delivery, DefineX executed non-related chunks in a parallel fashion, whereas dependent chunks are executed in series. This approach accelerated the project delivery and timeline significantly, and optimized overall delivery effort.

TECHNOLOGY

The technology architecture designed for Türk Telekom is based on the Oracle software and Linux machines to provide end to end integrity and avoid any compatibility issues.

• Hardware: Virtual Machines with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
• Software: Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c with following products used; WebLogic, Service Bus, SOA Suite, Enterprise Manager, Web Services Manager (OWSM).
• Database: Oracle Database 12c

RESULTS ACHIEVED

Delivery of the project was a success story, which addressed many challenges around Fixed Middleware platform and made a remarkable impact with the following results:

1- Modern platform, which is based on the latest stable version of Oracle Fusion Middleware stack and running on up-to-date hardware, providing best of breed performance (e.g. resizing of domains based on current and projected future volumes) and administrative flexibility (e.g. installation of OSB/JMS domains on virtual servers).

2- Rationalization of multiple versions of the similar middleware components. (on application level and database level)

3- Physical separation of OSB/JMS domains mitigated cross-domain resource (especially CPU) dependency in case of high load and failure.

4- Enhanced security by hardware, operating system, WebLogic and Java version upgrades.

5- Switching to a low latency garbage collection algorithm (G1GC) together with Java version update.

6- Operational efforts cut by 30% due to

• Start-up acceleration through lazy loading and decommissioning of redundant composites (40% improvement.)
• Easier maintainability by the identification and decommissioning of redundant services and orphan technical artifacts. 37.4% of all technical artifacts were identified as redundant during the delivery.
• Around 20% improved performance on Enterprise Manager
• Log and alarm monitoring, tracking, and applying patches, data purge, all of which deliver easier Level 2 operational activities.
• Monitoring of OSB via Enterprise Manager.
• Enablement of Node Manager and easier control over managed servers via administrative console.

7- Saving in development efforts by

• IDE consolidation (same IDE for SOA and OSB development.),
• Visual debugger enablement for SOA,
• Acceleration by utilization of templates for OSB/SOA,
• Enablement of native adapters which are faster for implementation compared to a custom extension.

8- Enablement/utilization of new native features introduced with 12c including but not limited with:

• Templates (Pipeline, Project, Component, Custom Activity)
• Custom Authentication for Business Services
• Dynamic Validation
• Dynamic Replace
• Shared Variables
• nXSD Support
• Encryption/Decryption Personally Identifiable Info (PII)
• New Adapters (REST, LDAP, Coherence, MSMQ, etc.)
• Service Callout with Attachments.
• MDS Support for OSB
• OWSM Custom Assertions Support
• Stage Enable/Disable Support for Pipelines
• Maven Plugin
• Error Hospital
• Integration Workload Statistics

ABOUT DEFINEX

DefineX is a new generation company. We are building something unusual and unexpected with a new way of building a globally successful company.

Our history is built upon delivering very demanding visions of our customers through challenging business and technology transformation projects. For years, we are known for our industry expertise and rigorous focus on our Clients and with strong values.

We are keen to continue turning the toughest projects into reality and deliver the best quality to our customers. For next…

www.teamdefinex.com