One could argue hyperscale alternatives have become fashionable as of late. It’s only been a matter of days since outages affected services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, while the EU Data Act recently kicked into gear to weaken vendor lock-in for Europe's cloud customers.

It’s perhaps good timing then that the open-source and European-born Project Sylva received some strong industry recognition via new telecom cloud releases from both SUSE and Red Hat.

September saw SUSE update its Sylva-based SUSE Edge for Telco telecom cloud solution to offer an AI-native transformation suite under the new name of SUSE Telco Cloud. Red Hat then threw its hat in the ring by announcing compliance of its OpenShift cloud platform with Sylva’s telecom and edge-focused framework.

Launched in 2022 by Linux Foundation Europe, Sylva was developed with founding support from Telefónica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, and Nokia. The initiative aims to deliver a unified cloud software framework and reference implementation to streamline cloud infrastructure for telecommunications and edge computing services.

Built on open-source technologies and open APIs, Sylva seeks to minimize vendor lock-in risks associated with hyperscale cloud providers. Its inception has drawn on several Linux Foundation telecom projects, including Kubernetes, the Nephio 5G automation initiative, Anuket’s infrastructure reference program, and LF Edge.

Sylva today

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, joined Sylva in 2023 to validate its Kubernetes distribution across key telecom workloads such as the 5G core, radio access network (RAN), and far-edge deployments. The project’s most recent version, Sylva 1.5, introduced support for Canonical’s Kubernetes 1.32 in September, and sees Sylva unify the management of virtualized and cloud-native network functions (VNFs and CNFs) across private data centers, central offices, and edge sites.

Whether the Canonical/Kubernetes element further certified Sylva for telco clouds is debatable. Keith Basil VP and GM at SUSE’s Edge Business Unit, noted the move as important, but “not materially changing our strategy at all” as SUSE has been tied up with Sylva since its earlier incarnation as Project Egate. This has included all iterations of SUSE Telco Cloud across the years, including Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP).

Rich Stephens, VP for EMEA Telecommunications at Red Hat, meanwhile, told SDxCentral that Sylva compliance was long in its sights, allowing OpenShift to “extend flexibility and choice across any cloud.”

With the Sylva synchronization, Red Hat effectively proffers an open-source telco cloud to the market, building on existing OpenShift deployments by telecom names such as Ericsson, Telefónica, and T-Mobile.

SUSE’s telco cloud, meanwhile, is meant as a modular alternative to OpenShift and VMware Tanzu, developed originally in collaboration with operators such as Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Telecom Italia following SUSE’s acquisition of Kubernetes firm Rancher Labs.

That acquisition saw Basil join the SUSE fold, bringing his edge expertise over to SUSE’s telecom customers, with ATIP eventually becoming SUSE Edge for Telco. But speaking with those clients, the VP and team found their definition of edge started and ended with software in radio tower environments.

“But it's actually the entire ecosystem," Basil said. "So not only do we have the RAN, we have the core. we have OSS, BSS. It's a telco cloud, which is what the customers refer to [it as]. We wanted to be in lockstep.”

Hence the name change to SUSE Telco Cloud. But clients’ needs in the sector extend beyond branding definitions, as Basil explained, with Sylva helping meet their efficiency and modernization demands.

This comes down mainly to energy use. Basil explained that 5G core machines “are data center grade boxes without any management,” but customers want to turn on these machines only when needed.

With Kubernetes interfaces allowing this management capability, operators can “spin that hardware down to make it more energy efficient to operate.”

Red Hat’s Stephens similarly espouses a need to “reduce complexity and standardize on a common cloud-native platform,” but with more of an AI twist.

“[Our telco cloud] is ready for the AI era, enabling service providers to use their choice of AI tools and models, and to build, train, and manage their AI apps across any cloud environment,” Stephens said.

Beyond Europe

Speaking with SDxCentral, it’s clear both Red Hat and SUSE see Project Sylva as more than just a European answer to data residency needs within the continent.

“Its reach extends beyond Europe, since many European service providers operate around the world through direct operating businesses and partnerships,” Stephens said, while noting non-European contributors have joined Sylva in recent years. “Open source is essentially borderless, as anyone can contribute to it and access it from anywhere in the world."

Basil, meanwhile, notes Sylva interest in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Latin America, attracted to its “vision for cloud-native telco, 5G, core, and RAN.”

“We are champions of Sylva while promoting the fact that we have a product that’s Sylva-aligned,” Basil said, adding it’s all about customers wanting choice, arguing that SUSE “provides the most choice from an open source perspective.”

“I think we do it better than Canonical [and] Red Hat. We do have an opinionated stack, but that opinionated stack is still very flexible in terms of choice, where we think our competitors' offerings have a little bit more restriction in terms of what you can do," Basil claims. “For example, we have Kubernetes which runs on ARM and Intel. In the telco segment, it's all about moving packets as fast as possible, so we offer varied opinionated performance optimizations.”

Stephens believes Red Hat delivers “the latest innovation in balance with carrier-grade stability,” while touting “a broad ecosystem of hardware and software partners so that we can offer pre-integrated reference architectures.”

The exec notes telecom providers want a cloud that cuts cost, risk, and complexity, speeds up service deployment with automation, and offers more freedom to choose pre‑validated solutions.

“This applies more than ever in a world where companies need ongoing freedom of choice between on-premise sovereignty and public cloud scalability,” Stephens said.

Telco cloud future

Both Red Hat and SUSE will update their wares to keep with Sylva’s development, with the latter having a product manager on the Sylva steering committee.

Basil added SUSE is currently attracting tier-one players such as Nokia with its Telco Cloud, and upon saturation of that market will move onto tier-two operators and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs).

The VP also pointed to an internal validation framework which sets a performance envelope for future iterations of the cloud offering.

Aligning with the key Project Sylva tenet of open validation, SUSE’s vision is to offer the framework downstream to certain customers, who can then report results and issues upstream, and get rapid engineering support for fixes before production deployment.

“Wherever Sylva's going, that's where we're going,” Basil added. "There are so many downstream benefits of that, because when you just follow the community and you support the community, you're just naturally aligned, and it pays off down the road with closing deals and supporting the aggregation of those components.”