The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) launched a new iteration of its trademark software infrastructure platform and rolled out enhancements to other projects that have been gaining significant momentum in the telecom space. These include two being used extensively by AT&T and Verizon in their 5G deployments.

The biggest move was the release of Victoria, which is the 22nd OpenStack release. Victoria builds on the previous Ussuri launch with more than 20,000 code changes that include native integration with Kubernetes and more support for diverse infrastructure deployments.

The Kubernetes integration is on the back of the Kuryr container networking plugin. It acts as the link that delivers the OpenStack networking into containers. Kuryr now has support for customer resource definitions (CRDs) that remove the need for it to use annotations to store data about OpenStack objects in the Kubernetes API.

“Kuryr has adopted this as the way that it passes information back and forth between the underlying infrastructure that a Kubernetes cluster may be running on and the Kubernetes environment itself,” explained OSF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce, in a press briefing. “This is great because it brings the two systems closer together using the native components on each side.”

The OSF also updated its Tacker OpenStack NFV orchestration platform so that it supports additional Kubernetes object files and virtual network function (VNF) APIs. It also gained features like lifecycle management, scaling, and VNF operation from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s (ETSI) NFV solutions specification.

OSF’s Ironic bare metal management platform also gained better support for standalone usage in Kubernetes or edge environments by breaking down its composition and deployment steps. Bryce explained that this is referred to as standalone Ironic.

“That is a trend that I would say in the last year we've seen emerging as something that's a lot of interest to different organizations,” Bryce said of the Ironic update. “This points to that diversification of how people are building their environments. We're not just seeing infrastructure centralized and in big data centers with big clouds, but we're starting to see it broken down into compute that may be in a data center, it may be in a facility like a manufacturing facility, or it may be out on the edge in a kind of a telco environment or something like that. So, what we see happening with the development of Ironic is really an evolution to support those different use cases.”

Speaking of telecom use cases, OSF also talked about updates for its Airship and StarlingX projects.

The OpenStack-based Airship initially came out of work done by AT&T and has since become a bedrock of that carrier’s SDN efforts. AT&T’s latest efforts are now being pushed into what will become Airship 2.0, which the carrier is using to run its 5G network.

Bryce explained that the update will include similar features like a smaller footprint, better performance, and improvements to speed. These will be based on updates to the smaller projects that make up the broader Airship project.

One is Metal3 (pronounced metal-cubed), which acts as a bridge between Kubernetes and Ironic to allow for the management of bare metal through the Kubernetes environment and Kubernetes API. Other new projects within Airship 2.0 are a control feature that allows for the management of an Airship environment and a graphical user interface that allows for a visual management plane of the declarative state Airship is maintaining.

“Overall, what the goal is with Airship 2.0 is to standardize on the set of projects that's maintained by a bigger community of people across both [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] projects, OpenStack Foundation projects, and other projects that are maybe not at a foundation at all and really improve the performance and the footprint within these environments,” Bryce said.

StarlingX is in the middle of a release cycle, but the CNCF-certified Kubernetes environment has become an important cog in Verizon’s 5G network plans. Specifically, the OpenStack project is the basis for Wind River’s Cloud Platform that can manage physically separated infrastructure for virtual radio access networks (vRANs) and core data center sites.

Verizon is using that Wind River platform as the middleware for its broader vRAN deployment that was announced in August. That deployment also includes Samsung’s 5G vRAN hardware and Intel’s Xeon Scalable processor, FPGA acceleration card, Ethernet network adapter, and its FlexRAN software reference architecture.

“It's basically ultra-low latency, high-availability, tier-one requirements, and it's all built on StarlingX supported by Wind River,” Bryce said of Verizon’s deployment.

OSF managed to hit its latest Victoria update on schedule, something that is impressive considering the outside distractions that have impacted the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. This impact was highlighted by the Kubernetes Project, which pushed the release date of its latest 1.19 update several months to allow its developer community to deal with those outside influences.

OSF’s Bryce acknowledged that “2020 has probably not been the year that any of us expected and has not gone according to plans.” He noted that OSF adjusted by splitting out work that OSF had planned to announce at a since-canceled event originally scheduled for June, and instead has constructed shorter events “to keep the community connected and engaged.” This resulted in what Bryce said has been an uptick in contributions and other projects.

“In a year like this where we haven't been able to have our normal events and our normal interactions, the community has come together and found ways to help each other out and you push forward,” Bryce said.