SUSE scores with Orange Telco Cloud to boost open source Sylva cloud strategy

Orange has used cloud management software from SUSE in its experimental network, and is now moving it into its Telco Cloud Network platform.

As Orange builds out its cloud-native capabilities to support its network and network services based on the open source Sylva project, it is using cloud software capabilities from SUSE.

The companies said this week that they have been utilising SUSE’s Rancher Prime container management software and Nuevector (security) products to manage container clusters within its Orange Telco Cloud, following work the companies did in Orange’s experimental Pikeo network.

Sylva is an open source, operator-led programme that sits in the Linux Foundation and that seeks to define a cloud software and operating environment specifically for telco use cases. Its aim is to break the industry’s dependence on proprietary systems by leveraging open source technology, and moving from vertical to horizontal cloud platforms.

In 2023 the two companies said that Orange had been using SUSE’s Rancher Kubernetes lifecycle management software for its experimental Pikeo network, running on 15 entities with “several hundred” live clusters.

Following on from that, Orange has decided to leverage Rancher Prime to underpin the first beta release of Sylva.

And Orange said it is using Rancher Prime to support the launch of Orange Telco Cloud, delivering on-demand points of presence (PoPs) that enable services including SD-WAN and 5G roaming.

“There are several ways to manage cloud native deployments, but we wanted to use as much native Kubernetes functionality as possible,” Orange’s Philippe Ensarguet said on a SUSE case study page.

“To achieve this goal, we decided to leverage Kubernetes Cluster API [CAPI] to provision our clusters. With Rancher Prime, SUSE offered us the technology we needed to implement the CAPI [Cluster API] bootstrapper on our Kubernetes nodes, enabling us to manage 100% of our cloud deployments with Kubernetes.”

Sylva V1 was released in February 2024, outlining technical requirements to host 5G Cloud-native Network Function and Edge workloads, and a declarative approach to manage thousands of Kubernetes clusters, automate operations and the lifecycle of the CaaS layer and BareMetal infrastructure (OS provisioning).

Orange has been one of its main advocates, demo-ing Sylva capabilities within its Pikeo experimental network and now within its Orange Telco Cloud. A cloud native solution, Orange Telco Cloud is managed with Rancher Prime and delivers on-demand points of presence (PoPs) — enabling ultra-low-latency services including SD-WAN and 5G roaming.

Philippe Ensuarget, VP Software Engineering, Orange, said, “The telco industry is a very narrow industry but we can decide to do it in another way, in a standardised and open and open source way.

“The work we made on the Pikeo project is a scale one 5G SA deployment. A full-scale sandbox where the idea was to implement and release true cloud native network function services for 5G – and we had to manage the lifecycle and the upgrade of services. That’s where we started with SUSE and in particular around Rancher, supporting management of the lifecycle and how we are doing upgrades.

“The second [SUSE] impact is ATIP – a cloud native implementation for the telco industry for bare metal and VM implementation, image hardening and life cycle management, and putting it all together 100% as open source.

SUSE featured as part of TMN’s update on telco cloud native networks at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024. At that time SUSE’s Keith Basil said that the company was seeing great interest from telco operators – although he wasn’t able to name them – because its ATIP platform provided the capabilities specified by Sylva.

“What ATIP effectively is, is a downstream commercialisation of that [SYVLA] reference architecture that’s fully supported,” Basil told TMN.

“We decided to embrace the Cluster API… so all of the integration glue that has that is needed for a C-API defined cluster, to orchestrate the building of a machine from an off state to a running cluster, we’ve done all of that.

“So if a telco customer, for example, has their own tooling, or command and control facilities, we can just give them the Cluster API which they can target, and then they can build their own clusters using our entire toolset from that point forward. So there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility.”

With Orange publically backing ATIP as part of its Sylva cloud deployment, SUSE has a major T1 customer reference for its open source Kubernetes management capabilities, joining a clutch of companies that are probably better known in telco cloud deployments, such VMware, Red Hat and Wind River.

The test for Orange – and by extension SUSE – will be how much it can indeed horizontalise its Sylva deployment to deliver its cloud-native functionality across its network.  But the open source approach with SUSE, and the adoption of the Sylva platform, will atttract attention from those who still believe that telcos need to develop their own platforms, independent of reliance on vendor product plans.