Dell Technologies and AT&T agreed to deepen their collaboration on open source edge architecture. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the open-source community to:
- Align on an overall vision of network disaggregation and accelerate the deployment of open infrastructure and AT&T Network Cloud utilizing Airship – a collection of loosely coupled, but interoperable, open-source tools that declaratively automate cloud provisioning and life-cycle management utilizing containers as the unit of software delivery.
- Catalyze the broader Airship community to accelerate Airship toward a 2.0 release, delivering a streamlined aggregator of best-of-breed open technologies for declaratively deploying and managing Kubernetes environments and cloud software.
- Jointly develop and enhance additional open-source efforts, including Metal3-io and OpenStack Ironic, and integrate the Kubernetes Cluster API.
- Deliver open-source automation capabilities across the stack – from bare metal to network to storage – on Dell Technologies infrastructure.
“Dell Technologies’ addition to the Airship community reaffirms the industry’s growing trust and investment in the open infrastructure model,” said Amy Wheelus, vice president, AT&T Network Cloud. “This collaboration will not only enable us to accelerate the AT&T Network Cloud on the Dell Technologies infrastructure, but also further the broader community goal of making it as simple as possible for operators to deploy and manage open infrastructure in support of SDN and other workloads.”
“Dell Technologies is working closely with AT&T to combine our joint telco industry best practices with decades of data center transformation experience to help service providers quickly roll out new breeds of experiential Edge and 5G services,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, vice president, Dell EMC Service Provider Solutions. “As the world leader in servers, storage and personal computers, Dell’s world class supply chain is best positioned to deliver the cost structure, predictability and access to emerging infrastructure technologies required to enable the transition to a more open, disaggregated mobile network.”
Project Airship aims for fully containerized clouds – OpenStack on Kubernetes
AT&T is working with SKT, Intel and the OpenStack Foundation to launch Project Airship, a new open infrastructure project that will offer a unified, declarative, fully containerized, and cloud-native platform. The idea is to let cloud operators manage sites at every stage from creation through minor and major updates, including configuration changes and OpenStack upgrades.
AT&T said the project builds on the foundation laid by the OpenStack-Helm project launched in 2017. In a blog posting, Amy Wheelus, vice president of Cloud and Domain 2.0 Platform Integration, says the initial focus is “to introduce OpenStack on Kubernetes (OOK) and the lifecycle management of the resulting cloud, with the scale, speed, resiliency, flexibility, and operational predictability demanded of network clouds.”
She states that AT&T will use Airship as the foundation of its network cloud running over its 5G core, which will support the launch of 5G services in 12 cities later this year. Airship will also be used by Akraino Edge Stack, which is a new Linux Foundation project for creating an open source software stack supporting high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications.
“We are pleased to bring continued innovation with Airship, extending the work we started in 2016 with the OpenStack and Kubernetes communities to create a continuum for modern and open infrastructure. Airship will bring new network edge capabilities to these stacks and Intel is committed to working with this project and the many other upstream projects to continue our focus of upstream first development and accelerating the industry,” stated Imad Sousou, corporate vice president and general manager of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel.
Mirantis to power AT&T’s Airship for Kubernetes infrastructure
AT&T has selected Mirantis to play a key role in its implementation Airship, Kubernetes and OpenStack based Network Cloud infrastructure. Airship is the project originally founded by AT&T, SKT and Intel under the OpenStack Foundation for enabling telcos to take advantage of on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure to support their SDN infrastructure builds. “Replacing VM-based infrastructure with cloud-native, open technologies based on containers…
