Wind River today announced the commercial availability of a Kubernetes-based cloud platform designed to manage edge cloud infrastructure. Wind River Cloud Platform can manage physically separated infrastructure for virtual radio access networks (vRANs) and core data center sites, according to the software vendor.

The cloud native technologies encompassed in the offering are “specifically for edge compute applications such as 5G vRAN,” said Paul Miller, VP of telecommunications at Wind River, in response to questions. The platform is based on the OpenStack Foundation’s StarlingX project, and Wind River claims it’s the world’s first cloud infrastructure designed purely for 5G vRAN applications.

Features include the ability to deploy and manage thousands of sites as a single cloud-native infrastructure from a central hub, scale down to a single server node at the far edge, orchestrate software updates in a zero-touch manner, and deploy edge clouds from bare metal, according to Miller. It also includes the edge node latency performance required to fully virtualize 5G vRAN functions including industrial IoT and mobile-edge computing, he explained.

While traditional cloud technology based on OpenStack was used by operators to host NFV and virtual network functions (VNF), 5G poses new requirements that legacy technology cannot meet, Miller said. “The complexities and cost of deploying tens of thousands of nodes across huge geographical territories would be an unsustainable prospect,” Miller said.

“The evolution of virtualization technology to containers from virtual machines produces a more efficient infrastructure that can host more functions per mode, and do so in a more performant manner with positive attributes such as lower latency than legacy architectures,” he added.

Wind Rivers expects the vRAN market for 5G to evolve first in North America, followed by Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. “There is global operator interest and active pursuit of vRAN technology for 5G as the ideal approach to deploy 5G at scale in a disaggregated cloud framework model,” Miller said.

The evolution to 5G is a five-year journey, and early efforts have centered around radio frequency technology but the shift to scalable production deployment is underway, according to Miller. “This shift starts with the larger operators and gradually moves to the rest of the market as the technology and operational procedures are proven out.”

Wind River also announced a new collaboration with Dell Technologies that will integrate the Wind River Cloud Platform with Dell EMC PowerEdge server hardware.