AT&T is working with SKT, Intel and the OpenStack Foundation to launch a new open infrastructure project called Airship. This project builds on the foundation laid by the OpenStack-Helm project launched in 2017. It lets cloud operators manage sites at every stage from creation through minor and major updates, including configuration changes and OpenStack upgrades. It does all this through a unified, declarative, fully containerised, and cloud-native platform.
Built using microservices, Airship makes it easy for telecom companies, manufacturers, health care providers or individual developers to predictably build and manage cloud infrastructure. The ultimate goal of Airship is to help operators take hardware from loading dock to an OpenStack cloud, all while ensuring first-class life cycle management of that cloud once it enters production, AT&T said in a press release.
The initial focus of this project is the implementation of a declarative platform to introduce OpenStack on Kubernetes (OOK) and the lifecycle management of the resulting cloud, with the scale, speed, resiliency, flexibility, and operational predictability demanded of network clouds.
AT&T is contributing code for Airship that started in collaboration with SKT, Intel and a number of other companies in 2017. It’s the foundation of AT&T’s network cloud that will run AT&T's 5G core supporting the late 2018 launch of 5G service in 12 cities. Airship will also be used by Akraino Edge Stack, which is a new Linux Foundation project. Akraino is intended to create an open source software stack supporting high-availability cloud services optimised for edge computing systems and applications.
Airship will fuel and accelerate AT&T's Network AI initiative which houses several of its other open source projects.
