AT&T’s next-generation containerized core will be running on top of Airship 2.0, and a beta release of the open infrastructure project is imminent, according to Ryan van Wyk, VP of network cloud at AT&T. General availability of Airship 2.0 will be achieved before the end of the year, he said.

The operator’s nationwide 5G network is “all running on our network cloud deployments that are all running on top of Airship, and frankly, the ability for us to get that done has been tied to the speed at which we can deploy that infrastructure and also the ease at which we can lifecycle manage it to the next version,” van Wyk told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

“We’re essentially delivering new versions of network cloud every three to four weeks now, so that’s allowing us to move really, really quickly,” he said. 

AT&T Demonstrates ‘Ephemeral Node’ Concept

The second version of Airship, a project led by the OpenStack Foundation, enables what AT&T calls the “ephemeral node” over its radio access network. It’s a “novel concept,” van Wyk said, that allows operators to deploy a Kubernetes environment on one node, something it’s demonstrated with Redfish APIs and Airshipctl, a command-line interface for the management of declarative infrastructure intents across a public or private cloud deployment.

“We can now use that thing as the point of genesis for the rest of the environment so it can now reach out and go and see all the other hosts it needs to provision. It can leverage the single lifecycle to do that and then when it’s done, we call it an ephemeral node because it kills itself,” he explained. 

This framework delivers a complete and lightweight environment “because the control plane that we’re deploying is essentially ephemeral. We use Airshipctl from the outside to kind of reach in and do the actions we want to create the services on demand,” van Wyk said. 

“Because that stuff’s ephemeral and it just goes away when it’s done doing what it needs to do, you don’t have to put as much effort into making sure those previously long-running services are highly resilient and secure anymore because they exist for a couple minutes and then they go away.”

Open Source Project Abundance

AT&T’s interest and support in open source projects runs much deeper than Airship. It contributes to and helps lead multiple efforts for cloud and edge computing on projects including Kubernetes, kubeadm, kustomize, Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Fluentd and Helm projects, and others. 

“Those types of things are foundational to what we’re doing,” van Wyk said. “We are investing as a consumer and an integrator of those building blocks, but not the author. And we go work in those various project communities to drive them in the direction that we’d like to see. We’re not trying to build our own thing.”

The myriad open source projects in AT&T’s orbit are at various stages of maturity. Akraino, an edge stack project under the Linux Foundation initiated by AT&T and Intel, has informed some deployments out in the field for AT&T, but the operator is still in the exploration phase with that project and weighing its options, according to van Wyk. 

Grandiose Vision Nears Reality

All of these projects feed into AT&T’s more grandiose vision for open source technology as it relates to network infrastructure, edge, and cloud computing, he explained. 

“I’d like to get to a point where you essentially have multiple platforms depending on what your use case is,” van Wyk said. “What I would prefer is three different implementations — one designed to run on bare metal in a private environment, one designed to maybe run on top of [virtual machines] in somebody else’s public cloud, and one that’s running in the core public cloud of that provider.”

Today, AT&T has to pick multiple vendors to stitch that together, but parts of that more agile vision for network cloud will materialize in the next 18 months, he said. The entire stack required for that framework is probably three to five years out, he added. 

“We inform our educated guesses on how long things are going to take from how long they took the last time when we went through this virtualization journey to start with, and I have a feeling it’s going to go a little faster this time,” van Wyk said. 

The options available to AT&T were few and far between when it embarked on its open source journey, and as such it took it upon itself to help push the industry to a software-defined model, he said. “Up until this point we’ve been heavily involved in the communities that we’ve either helped initiate or have felt have been extremely critical to us.”

The operator also encourages other operators, vendors, and developers to step up to the challenge because diversity is required for any technology to be viable in the long run, van Wyk said. 

“We’re trying consciously to make sure that we’re not running all the different areas and that our peers from Verizon, Vodafone, and Orange, and others are helping and they’re taking lead roles in other areas,” he said. “Our model has been ‘let’s try to help drive things as much as we can.’"

AT&T hopes and expects to reduce its level of involvement in some open source communities as key goals are achieved. “I see our role evolving going forward based on where the velocity is, or where the contribution is, but I think we’ll still have a pretty strong role given our knowledge in what we’re trying to do in the telco space.”