Wind River today formally debuted its cloud-native 5G edge network middleware based on Kubernetes and containers. Wind River Studio, which provides operators with a platform to develop, deploy, operate, and manage 5G distributed edge clouds, is now commercially available.

The release marks the second official unveiling in the last week of cloud-native network infrastructure that Verizon deployed in its 5G radio access network (RAN) last summer to initiate what it described as the world’s first completely virtualized 5G data session — from the network core, to the RAN, and edge of the network. Samsung last week released its fully virtualized 5G RAN portfolio that Verizon used in the same deployment. 

Wind River operated as a subsidiary of Intel after the chipmaker acquired the company for $884 million, but it later sold the company to a private equity firm in 2018 just as early 5G deployments got underway. Multiple pieces of Intel hardware and software are also deployed in combination with Wind River Studio and Samsung’s 5G vRAN equipment in Verizon’s 5G network. 

“Virtualizing the entire network from the core to the edge has been a massive, multi-year redesign effort of our network architecture that simplifies and modernizes our entire network,” Srini Kalapala, Verizon’s VP of technology planning and development, said in a statement.

The Wind River Studio general availability release includes far edge cloud infrastructure, a zero-touch deployment process, analytics, and container orchestration for 5G vRAN, the vendor said. The vendor’s analytics software provides tools for data collection, monitoring, and reporting. 

"The multifaceted needs of a 5G network create new requirements, tied to its highly distributed nature both from technology and operational perspectives, that legacy technology cannot meet," Paul Miller, CTO at Wind River, wrote in response to questions. "Due to 5G’s requirement to distribute compute nodes to tens of thousands of different sites to support the virtualization of the 5G network and the applications hosted at the edge, there is a fundamental mismatch to legacy virtualization approaches."

Traditional approaches to network virtualization were designed for single cloud data centers, and to realize the vision of 5G as a distributed system "the industry must look to cloud-native, geo-distributed cloud solutions to solve modern problems, both technological and operational, introduced by 5G," Miller explained.

He claims that Wind River Studio can lower costs by up to 75% compared to legacy virtualization services. The vendor has held discussions with multiple potential customers, but Miller declined to name any of those operators or share examples of momentum with operators other than Verizon.

"Wind River also has, as a result of designing and now live deploying 5G networks, developed significant consultative experience in how to properly design, deploy, and operate these networks," he said.

Wind River's core to edge orchestration platform allows operators to automate the management of distributed cloud networks and application services, including containers, network elements, and devices connected to the edge. The company also announced the availability of developer capabilities in public preview, including a DevSecOps environment that allows customers to build and test devices or systems at the edge.

Once an operator commits to 5G vRAN it can work with Wind River Studio to design and deploy the applications that are required to build a foundation for virtualized radios and other equipment and software to run alongside, Miller explained.

"Thus," he added, "Wind River Studio is the central layer in the three-layered vRAN architecture," which includes compute hardware, distributed cloud infrastructure, and vRAN applications.