AT&T is working with SK Telecom (SKT), Intel Corp., and the OpenStack Foundation to launch a new open infrastructure project for clouds called Airship.

“Simply put, Airship lets you build a cloud easier than ever before,” said Amy Wheelus, AT&T’s vice president of cloud and Domain 2.0 Platform integration, in a blog post. “Whether you’re a telecom, manufacturer, health care provider, or an individual developer, Airship makes it easy to predictably build and manage cloud infrastructure.”

Airship will let cloud operators manage sites at every stage from creation through minor and major updates, including configuration changes and OpenStack upgrades. It does this through a unified, declarative, fully containerized, and cloud-native platform.

AT&T is contributing code for Airship. It’s actually been working with SKT, Intel, and a number of other companies as part of the OpenStack Helm project launched in 2017.

“It’s the foundation of AT&T’s network cloud that will run our 5G core, supporting the late 2018 launch of 5G service in 12 cities,” said Wheelus. “Airship will also be used by Akraino Edge Stack, which is a new Linux Foundation project. Akraino is intended to create an open source software stack supporting high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications.”

Airship will be built using microservices, “which we think are the future of software development,” added Wheelus. “This lets each Airship microservice perform one specific role in the cloud delivery and management process.”

The initial focus of the Airship project is the implementation of a declarative platform to introduce OpenStack on Kubernetes (OOK) and the lifecycle management of the resulting cloud.

AT&T said last November that it was planning to put more reliance on Kubernetes in its AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC) platform, which is based on OpenStack. Ryan van Wyk, assistant vice president of Cloud Platform Development at AT&T Labs, said at the time that the use of the Kubernetes would add more agility and remove costs from running the AIC platform.

Van Wyk said in today’s blog, “Airship is going to allow AT&T and other operators to deliver cloud infrastructure predictably that is 100 percent declarative, where day zero is managed the same as future updates via a single unified workflow, and where absolutely everything is a container from the bare metal up.”

Wheelus describes “declarative” as “every aspect of your cloud is defined in standardized documents that give you extremely flexible and fine grain control of your cloud infrastructure. You simply manage the documents themselves and submit them and the platform takes care of the rest.”

Airship will undoubtedly be a big topic at next week’s OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada. And SDxCentral will be there to bring you the coverage.