The development of an open source cloud software architecture by top European telcos and vendors, including Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Vodafone, aims to eliminate infrastructure fragmentation in the European context.
The creation of Project Sylva was announced today by the Linux Foundation Europe. Project Sylva’s shared cloud software framework and adjacent reference implementation which is intended to produce a new open source production-grade Telco Cloud Stack and will lessen the fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telephony and edge services. Less than two months after its introduction, LF Europe’s first project to be hosted is called Sylva.
Five European carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom) along with two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form the Sylva project to address challenges related to telco and edge use cases within the EU and globally. This project was born out of a desire to reduce complexity and accelerate cloudification of the network within the EU’s privacy, security, and energy efficiency requirements. In order to provide implementations and expansions, Project Sylva will be built upon already-existing open source projects. While the Sylva project is open to collaborators outside the European Union, it has wider objectives and should be considered as a global actor in the Telco Cloud ecosystem despite serving unique European demands.
Project Sylva’s specific objectives consist of the following:
- To release a cloud software framework to organise requirements, create solutions that can be included into already-existing open source components, and create solutions that are good enough for use in commercial goods.
- To hasten the adoption of network functions within the cloud, develop a reference implementation of this cloud software architecture and establish an integration and validation program.
“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 Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “A unified approach to hosting 5G deployment applications from the Core to the RAN is critical for fostering innovation for broad digital transformation, augmenting work in LF Networking and LF Edge communities.”
