Out with the Old, In with the New [Telco Edition]: A Canonical and Spectro Cloud Collaboration at MWC 2023

Canonical and Spectro Cloud’s OpenRAN Service Orchestration Solution is liberating Service Providers from industry heavyweight lock-in

Introduction:

As Mobile World Congress 2023 is upon us, the latest technological advances in the telecom industry will take center stage.

At the forefront of these advances are the innovations brought about by open-source technologies. At Canonical, we are leading the way in this space, with groundbreaking developments in OpenRAN automation and distributed compute management that outperform our competition. 

Canonical and Spectro Cloud have collaborated to develop a Telco Radio Edge solution, which leverages technology building blocks such as Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS with RT kernel and the MicroK8s CAPI provider to meet the complex needs of highly distributed edge node onboarding, secure deployment, and substrate provisioning with MicroK8s, while enabling OpenRAN o-DU service orchestration at scale. This advanced technology stack showcases the latest advances in collaboration between Dell Edge devices, Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS with RealTime Kernel support for Intel FlexRAN SDK, and any FlexRAN community DU vendor deployment onto a Canonical MicroK8s Kubernetes edge deployed and managed by Spectro Cloud Palette through a CAPI provider and their innovative zero-touch provisioning Kairos OS edge native onboarding technology.

Technology Building Blocks:

The technology stack uses Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS with RT kernel and MicroK8s CAPI provider to handle complex edge node onboarding, secure deployment, and substrate provisioning with Kairos, Ubuntu and MicroK8s. This integration simplifies the onboarding, deployment and management of MicroK8s clusters on the edge, which optimizes the performance, scalability, reliability, and security of OpenRAN o-DU service orchestration.

Canonical and Intel have collaborated to enhance the performance and efficiency of the solution, leading to greater scalability, reliability, and security. They have worked closely to ensure that Ubuntu 22.04 + RT kernel is the most efficient and performant Linux distribution for Intel FlexRAN solutions, supporting Intel’s latest 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors for deployments.

Spectro Cloud and Canonical will showcase an end-to-end hybrid multi-cloud solution at MWC featuring edge DU HW onboarding automation, substrate deployment of Ubuntu RT + Microk8s supporting Intel ACC-100 Mount Bryce acceleration technology, and the automatic DU placement and service instantiation towards the CU on private DC clouds within the customer network. The solution will also enable automatic service creation towards the customer AWS deployed 5GC.

Demos at MWC:

The demos presented at MWC will highlight the advanced capabilities of the MicroK8s CAPI provider for Spectro Cloud’s Palette CaaS solution, in combination with Kairos for Edge Native onboarding to deploy Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS, RealTime Kernel and Microk8s to enable OpenRAN o-DU service orchestration at scale. The demos will cover many scenarios, including onboarding edge nodes, deploying single edge nodes, and deploying edge clusters with the real-time kernel. They will also demonstrate how the system can be upgraded seamlessly without impacting running workloads.

Conclusion:

The collaboration between Canonical and Spectro Cloud has resulted in a highly performant and efficient solution for OpenRAN o-DU service orchestration, with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, performance, and power efficiencies that are unrivalled in the industry. By combining the Edge Native Kairos onboarding mechanisms with MicroK8s’ CAPI provider managed by Spectro Cloud’s Palette CaaS solution, a new era of highly distributed infrastructure substrates can host even the most demanding modern OpenRAN o-DU, 5G UPF or AI/ML use-cases at scale. The demos presented at MWC showcase the various aspects of the technology stack and highlight the advanced capabilities of the MicroK8s CAPI provider. If you want to learn more about this innovative technology stack, visit them at MWC.

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At MWC, you’ll have the opportunity to meet with our world-class team of experts and thought leaders, who are eager to share their insights and expertise with you. Whether you’re interested in discussing the latest developments in OpenRAN automation, distributed compute management, or AI/ML, our team is ready to engage in some thought-provoking conversations with you. See you in Hall 3, 3F10Ex. 

Book a meeting with us