SUSE claims Sylva medal – says only vendor aligned with operators’ cloud project

SUSE reckons itself the only provider currently aligned with the open source telco cloud project Sylva.

Cloud company SUSE, featured on TMN last week for its work with Orange, has this week said it is the only cloud vendor with a product that is architecturally aligned with the recommendations of Project Sylva.

Sylva is an open source container-as-a-service (CaaS) project being led by European telcos, as they seek to define a common cloud environment for their different use cases from edge to core.

SUSE, which can be viewed as a competitor to the likes of Red Hat (also a Sylva project member) and Wind River, has released General Availability of its Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP) 3.1 release.

It is this release that SUSE claims is the only platform to be architecturally aligned with Sylva.

However, this claim doesn’t rest on validation from Sylva itself, rather on SUSE’s own assessment.

Keith Basil, general manager of the SUSE Edge business unit, said, “The statement in the press release is based on SUSE’s own analysis of its own and competitors’ platforms. SUSE employees are on the Sylva board and active participants in multiple Sylva workstreams (Technical and Marketing).

“Such an active participation in the activities of Project Sylva and our knowledge of how our customers use our ATIP platform in real world deployments, provides us the insights needed to make the claim. SUSE is an early and contributing member to Project Sylva and we are tightly aligned with Sylva specifications.”

The company said that ATIP 3.1 ATIP 3.provides an open-source, lightweight common telco cloud layer to host virtualised and container-based network functions. It has previously described SUSE as a telco-optimiesd edge computing platform with “validated designs” that speed up time to deployment and performance, with automated scaling and deployment.

SUSE said that more than a decade of working as a supplier to tier-1 network equipment providers has helped it develop a “mature high-performance edge runtime and a small-footprint edge stack with components purposely built for edge computing”.

Syvla was founded in late 2022 byt the “big five” European telcos, and published its first release in February 2024. It has also started a validation programme for CNF (Cloud Native Function) performance on the Sylva stack.

UPDATE 16-10-2024: SUSE backs truth of claim but withdraws it from press release

TMN wrote this story after being sent an embargoed draft of SUSE’s press release, which included the claim that SUSE was the only vendor fully architecturally aligned with Sylva. As the story shows, we asked for clarification and received confirmation from the company of that claim, attributed to one of its executives.

When SUSE published its press release after the embargo lifted, the final draft of the press release did not include that claim. SUSE told us, “While SUSE believes the claim to be true, SUSE didn’t feel like it fully aligned to its goals around open source collaboration and have decided to remove the statement from the draft press release initially shared.”