Linux Foundation Europe’s project draws the support of Ericsson, Nokia and five European telcos
Linux Foundation Europe announced Tuesday the formation of Project Sylva. The inaugural project from Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe), Project Sylva’s goal is to create a new, open source and production-grade telco cloud stack. The project has drawn the support of Ericsson, Nokia, and major international telecom companies including DT, Vodafone and Telefonica.
The objective of Project Sylva is to develop a unified end-to-end approach to hosting 5G deployment applications from the core to the Radio Access Network (RAN), said The Linux Foundation’s Arpit Joshipura, GM of Networking, Edge and IoT.
“We are pleased to collaborate closely with leading European telcos and vendors eager to more fully harness the power of open source to accelerate cloudification of the network within EU privacy and security guidelines,” said Joshipura.
The developers of Project Sylva expect to be able to publish a cloud software framework that will enable them to prioritize requirements and develop solutions integrated within existing open-source components that can be leveraged in commercial products. They also plan to develop a reference implementation of the software framework and to create an integration and validation program that will help accelerate the adoption of network functions in the cloud.
This news marks the first public project revealed by Linux Foundation Europe, which initially got off the ground in September. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Linux Foundation Europe launched with a dozen members including Ericsson, Accenture and Bank of England. The stated mission of the group is to accelerate European open-source collaboration efforts, hosted directly in Europe.
Linux Foundation Europe explained the genesis of the project: “Born out of a desire to reduce complexity and accelerate cloudification of the network within the EU’s privacy, security, and energy efficiency requirements, five European carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form the Sylva project to address challenges associated with telco and edge use cases within the EU and globally,” said the group.
While Linux Foundation Europe’s expressed goal is to foster open-source collaboration throughout Europe, Project Sylva has broader implications. The efforts backers want Project Sylva to be seen as international, however.
“Despite the specific European needs, the Sylva project has broader ambitions, and should be seen as a global player within the Telco Cloud ecosystem, as it’s open to collaborators outside the European Union as well,” said LF Europe.
Project Sylva is only one telecom-related project underway at the Linux Foundation. Earlier this year, the organization announced Project Nephio, a Kubernetes project aimed at Communication Service Providers (CSPs). The project has garnered support from dozens of companies including Verizon, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom. The goal of the project is to unify automation control planes abstracted from infrastructure, to help make multivendor cloud deployment and management easier and more performant, through intent automation and automation templates.
“Building, managing and deploying scalable 5G networks across multiple edge locations is complex. The Telco industry needs true cloud-native automation to be faster, simpler and easier, while achieving agility and optimization in cloud based deployments,” said the group.
Meanwhile, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation, is working on Envoy Gateway. The effort hopes to make Envoy, the open-source edge and service proxy, easier to use for telcos. Envoy helps wrangle load balancing and other networking complexities specific to cloud app microservice management. Envoy enables cloud developers and network operators to more easily observe and tune overall cloud app performance.
