Middle East telecom provider Etisalat announced today that it launched its first network functions virtualization (NFV) telco cloud, using Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack distribution, Arista's switches, and Quanta servers.

Etisalat’s NFV cloud, located in Abu Dhabi, is a product of its corporate-wide program that launched in 2016 to help “cloudify the network,” as the carrier puts it. The program’s goal is to find a balance between the hardware-centric telecom services and the software-centric cloud services across the corporation.

Etisalat began running its first NFV proofs-of-concept in 2013.

Canonical has been trying hard to become a big name in NFV, so the deal is a nice feather in its cap. In addition to Ubuntu, Etisalat will be using Canonical's Juju modeling and configuration tool as a virtual network function (VNF) manager.

Note that Canonical also contributed Juju charms to Open Source MANO (OSM) project for NFV management and orchestration.

Etisalat's use of OpenStack is also noteworthy, as there's ongoing interest in using the open source cloud management platform as an element of NFV MANO.