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 and Kubernetes yields order-of-magnitude efficiency improvements for telco network environments and beyond,” said Adrian Ionel, Mirantis Co-Founder and CEO. “Working so closely with AT&T in the Airship community will accelerate the delivery of the benefits of Kubernetes to the broad ecosystem of telecommunications providers.”
Mirantis is also collaborating with AT&T and other core contributors to develop critical features in support of the Airship community roadmap. Mirantis will primarily focus on:
Integration between Drydock and Ironic to provision bare metal Kubernetes clusters
Streamlining initial configuration experience of deploying Kubernetes-native services on premise, making it simpler for telcos to adopt
Support for multiple operating systems, to broaden the choice of VNFs and minimize lock-in
“As we roll out Network Cloud for 5G, our goal at AT&T is to run infrastructure based on open standards like Kubernetes and OpenStack,” said Ryan van Wyk, AVP — Network Cloud Software Engineering at AT&T. “Mirantis has a long track record of contributing to open source and we are glad to have them collaborate with us on the Airship project.”
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.
AT&T seeds Akraino project for carrier-scale edge computing
The Linux Foundation will host a new Akraino project to create an open source software stack supporting high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications.
To seed the project, AT&T is contributing code designed for carrier-scale edge computing applications running in virtual machines and containers.
“This project will bring the extensive work AT&T has already done to create low-latency, carrier-grade technology for the edge that address latency and reliability needs,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation. “Akraino complements LF Networking projects like ONAP in automating services from edge to core. We’re pleased to welcome it to The Linux Foundation and invite the participation of others as we work together to form Akraino and establish its governance.”
“Akraino, coupled with ONAP and OpenStack, will help to accelerate progress towards development of next-generation, network-based edge services, fueling a new ecosystem of applications for 5G and IoT,” said Mazin Gilbert, Vice President of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs.
