Red Hat has announced compliance of its OpenShift platform with the telecom and edge-focused Sylva framework.

In a recent blog post, Rich Stephens, VP for EMEA telecommunications at Red Hat, confirmed that Red Hat OpenShift is fully deployable with version 1.5 of Sylva, a cloud software framework geared toward a production-grade telecom cloud stack based on the needs of European operators.

Stephens cited technical contributions from Red Hat such as new bare-metal provisioning for increased deployment flexibility and scaling, as well as enhanced, natively integrated security.

The VP touted that users of Red Hat’s cloud platform would be able to deploy 5G core network software with automatic validation for a Sylva deployment, eliminating the need for testing and ensuring cost optimization as a result.

The integration sees Red Hat effectively proffer an open-source telco cloud to the market, building on existing Red Hat OpenShift deployments by telecom giants such as Ericsson, Telefónica, and T-Mobile, while looking to solve clients' fragmentation issues pertaining to legacy infrastructure and technical debt.

Sylva’s story

Sylva was released in 2022 under the auspices of Linux Foundation Europe, with its founding contributors made up of Telefónica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, and Nokia. The open-source project is targeted at providing a common cloud software framework and reference implementation designed to consolidate a cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services.

Also, with an infrastructure based on open-source technology and open APIs, Sylva was designed to avoid the lock-in risks associated with hyperscaler providers.

Since inception, the framework has borrowed from Linux Foundation telecommunication-focused projects such as Kubernetes, the Nephio 5G automation project, the Anuket infrastructure reference program, and LF Edge.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, joined the project in 2023, with the aim of validating Canonical Kubernetes for all major telecom network functions, including the 5G core, radio access network (RAN), and far-edge services.

Its most recent 1.5 release is the first to support Kubernetes 1.32 from Canonical, which includes 12 years of long-term Kubernetes support (LTS) for customers on certain tiers. This version was designed to unify the management of both virtualized (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) across private data centers, central offices, and edge sites.

“By converging the cloud layer around open source components with Kubernetes at its core, Sylva eliminates fragmentation. It establishes a single, validated foundation upon which network functions can be certified once and run anywhere, reducing complexity and unlocking the operational agility service providers desperately need,” said Red Hat’s Stephens.

The Red Hat compliance comes after the recent update to SUSE’s telecom cloud solution.

Also compliant with Sylva, the newly rebranded SUSE Telco Cloud was described as a carrier-grade, cloud-native foundation with solutions spanning the core network, RAN, and edge infrastructure. The cloud solution was also claimed to offer a fully automated deployment across the telecom stack, including OS and Kubernetes and network functions.