Mirantis Joins OpenStack Foundation’s Airship to Bring Kubernetes to Telcos

Company extends its upstream collaboration with AT&T and announces Airship integration into Mirantis Cloud Platform to support NFV infrastructure based on Kubernetes

CAMPBELL, CA — February 7, 2019 — Today Mirantis announced that it is joining Airship, a project originally founded by AT&T, SKT and Intel and launched as a pilot Open Infrastructure Project under the OpenStack Foundation in May 2018. One key use case for Airship is enabling telcos to take advantage of on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure to support their SDN infrastructure builds.

Mirantis will collaborate with AT&T and other core contributors to develop critical features in support of the Airship community roadmap. This work will be rapidly deployed in production at scale via AT&T’s Airship, Kubernetes and OpenStack based Network Cloud infrastructure.

Mirantis will primarily focus on:

• Integration between Drydock and Ironic to provision bare metal Kubernetes clusters
• Streamlining initial configuration experience of deploying Kubernetes-native services on premise, making it simpler for telcos to adopt
• Support for multiple operating systems, to broaden the choice of VNFs and minimize lock-in

“Replacing VM-based infrastructure with cloud-native, open technologies based on containers and Kubernetes yields order-of-magnitude efficiency improvements for telco network environments and beyond,” said Adrian Ionel, Mirantis Co-Founder and CEO. “Working so closely with AT&T in the Airship community will accelerate the delivery of the benefits of Kubernetes to the broad ecosystem of telecommunications providers.”

Airship takes advantage of Kubernetes to define a unified, declarative and cloud-native way for operators to manage containerized software delivery of cloud infrastructure services. At the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, AT&T shared its plans to roll Kubernetes on-premise based on Airship to underpin its 5G Network infrastructure.

“As we roll out Network Cloud for 5G, our goal at AT&T is to run infrastructure based on open standards like Kubernetes and OpenStack,” said Ryan van Wyk, AVP — Network Cloud Software Engineering at AT&T. “Mirantis has a long track record of contributing to open source and we are glad to have them collaborate with us on the Airship project.”

Aside from contributing to Airship upstream and collaborating with AT&T on key roadmap features, Mirantis is integrating much of the code into Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP), Mirantis’s core product that empowers telcos and enterprises to efficiently run Kubernetes on-premises. Mirantis will be demonstrating the benefits of adopting Kubernetes-based open infrastructure for 5G in a series of customer workshops at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

About the OpenStack Foundation (OSF)

The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) supports the development and adoption of open infrastructure globally, across a community of 100,000 individuals in 187 countries, by hosting open source projects and communities of practice, including datacenter cloud, edge computing, NFV, CI/CD and container infrastructure.