The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today released a platform that combines multiple projects under its purview to deliver 5G and LTE as private edge cloud service for enterprises.

Aether, pronounced “ether,” is the first open source edge cloud platform and the first open platform supporting connectivity as a service, Timon Sloane, VP of marketing at ONF, told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

Aether is based on Kubernetes, which he described as the “fundamental building block for the public cloud,” and it blends edge cloud, mobile edge computing and open radio access network (RAN) technology together. The non-profit, operator-led consortium believes the platform will enable more unique digital transformation efforts among enterprises.

“It’s not just a technology play, but by doing what we’re doing, we’re enabling new forms of collaboration and new open business models,” Sloane said. “The goal here is to support the APIs so that applications that are written to run in those public clouds can also run natively at the edge cloud.”

Aether supports licensed and unlicensed spectrum, all of the major public cloud providers, and is built on ONF’s CORD, ONOS and mobile core platforms. It is designed to facilitate more comprehensive deployments and management of edge connectivity for IoT devices, on-premises control of data and edge services, and supports open RAN.

A group of ONF’s partners, including Intel and Infosys, are operating Aether in a production pilot now across multiple locations as one operational network. “Aether is really natively combining connectivity with an edge cloud, so the control plane is central and a centralized control plane oversees all of the mobile core user planes at multiple edge sites,” said Oguz Sunay, chief architect for mobile networking at ONF.

Those network controls are traditionally unified and handled exclusively by network operators, but ONF believes that dynamic needs to change as enterprises gain more control over their networks and seek to manage their data and connectivity independently of a network operator, Sunay explained.

Aether is bringing together projects that have been under development and operating in their own sandbox, and under that framework ONF is trying to support a diversity of edge services on a converged platform, Sloane explained. ONF’s various projects will remain separate and continue to be consumable separately, but Aether is its attempt to bring multiple capabilities together to simplify private edge cloud operations for enterprises.

“We think we’re creating a new collaborative place where the industry and community can come together to help drive some maybe consolidation and critical mass behind a common platform that can then help common functionality proliferate in these edge clouds,” he said.

ONF planned to release and demonstrate Aether at the Open Compute Project's Global Summit this week, but that event, like many others, was canceled amid concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. At last year's event, the consortium released a trio of reference designs to foster more open source services in operator's network deployments.