With Mobile World Congress (MWC) in full swing, there has been no shortage of news about open radio access networks (open RANs) and the multitude of vendors racing to provide services to support that technology.

Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system (OS), is now entering the market with a new offering available on the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (EKS Anywhere) that is designed specifically for open RAN deployments. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that is at the foundation of cloud-native deployments.

EKS Anywhere is a particularly attractive offering for telcos as it enables organizations to deploy workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure or within an on-premises environment, with the ability to centrally manage deployments from a unified console. Multiple telcos are using EKS Anywhere, including Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which announced this week that it is using the technology.

EKS Anywhere can support any number of different Linux operating systems. AWS has its own Linux OS called Bottlerocket, and the platform can also run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Canonical is aiming to differentiate against other options by providing a real-time Ubuntu Linux distribution. “Real-time” is not just an adjective, it has a specific definition for an OS, meaning that it provides deterministic execution of operations. Simply put, the same operation will be able to be consistently executed within a very exact and precise timeframe.

Telcos (and open RAN, specifically) often require real-time responsiveness in order to meet service-level expectations.

Real-time performance is enabled through kernel modifications and CPU resource scheduling algorithms in the real-time Ubuntu Linux distribution. For telecom companies, these capabilities promise to boost the capabilities of open virtualized RAN deployments and 5G edge computing applications.

“We are pleased to mark another milestone in our continued collaboration with AWS by bringing real-time data processing, required by advanced open RAN workloads, on Amazon EKS Anywhere with Real-time Ubuntu,” Arno Van Huyssteen, CTO of telco at Canonical, wrote in a statement.

Ubuntu is one of the leading Linux distributions and has become a popular option for telcos overall. Canonical is currently putting the finishing touches on its next major release of Ubuntu 24.04, dubbed the Noble Numbat, which is expected to be released in April.

While Ubuntu is popular, it isn't the only distribution that telcos are using. IBM's Red Hat Linux division has had a lot of news at MWC announcing sustainability and technology initiatives for telcos.

SUSE Linux is also active in the space. Ahead of MWC, the SUSE Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP) 3.0 was announced as a cloud-native Kubernetes offering to help with 5G network deployments. Not to be outdone, the Linux Foundation Networking organization updated its Nephio cloud-native automation stack with a new release.