Telecommunications companies (telcos) are well on their way to transforming their infrastructure from the legacy, unadaptable, complex network of dedicated hardware from yesteryears to agile, modular and scalable software-defined systems running on common off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

Within this space, the current trend, driven by 5G deployments, is to complement tried and tested network function virtualisation (NFV) infrastructure with cloud-native network functions (CNFs). This refers to the cloud-native approach of building, deploying and managing telco functions and applications as a mesh of micro services packaged as containers.

A telco cloud is a highly robust and dynamic infrastructure built using cloud-native technologies designed specifically for communication services providers (CSPs) to deliver agile, flexible and efficient telecom services. It combines various components like software-defined networking (SDN), orchestration tools and other cloud computing technologies to enable the creation, customisation, and management of network services in a more cost-effective, scalable, and automated manner compared to traditional telecom architectures. It empowers telcos to reduce their innovations’ time to market, to react more quickly to shifts in network requirements and to improve their operational efficiency. A telco cloud provides the foundation for next-generation communication services, including 5G stand-alone (5G SA) networks and various Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

How does a telco cloud address telco challenges?

In order to stay innovative and competitive, telcos need ever more agility. They need to respond quickly to shifting market dynamics, evolving customer demands and emerging technologies. They require flexibility, modularity and freedom to customise solutions to keep up with the evolution of the industry. These are all areas in which a telco cloud can help.

Innovate and customise

With cloud-native application development techniques, telcos can leverage a telco cloud to bring new 5G revenue streams, internally developed or externally acquired from new tech and start-ups with a higher risk appetite than service providers.

They can reduce the time to develop, build and deploy new services and features to specific customer segments. This enables bringing solutions targeting new markets, such as industry monitoring, smart cities, smart homes, connected cars and fleet management.

These solutions can be tailored to specific customers quickly and economically thanks to the agility, modularity and flexibility of cloud-native software development.

Similarly, these technologies allow telcos to build platforms which can ignite collaboration and provide support to innovative third party developers. This can enable the creation of value in the telco’s core competencies, including connectivity and operational excellence, while reducing risks associated with the process of experimentation.

Increase power efficiency

Energy expenses currently comprise between 15% and 40% of telcos’ operating costs. They are all actively looking for ways to reduce their energy consumption through energy-efficient technology, renewable energy sources, and improved operational efficiency.

By virtualizing network functions and consolidating multiple workloads on a shared infrastructure, a telco cloud reduces the overall number of physical servers and corresponding power requirements. With intelligent load-balancing techniques, a telco cloud ensures optimal resource utilisation across the network, minimising idle resources and reducing the need for excess capacity, which in turn decreases power consumption. 

The use of specific analytics coupled with automation can be beneficial to optimise the power consumption of telco workloads. Underutilised wasteful infrastructure can be identified and massive power savings can be achieved with the right optimisation approach while maintaining network performance and service levels. A telco cloud offers the flexibility to scale resources up or down according to demand, ensuring that only the necessary compute, storage and network capacity is being used. The high availability and fault tolerance features of a telco cloud ensure minimal downtime and prevent overloading of resources, thereby optimising energy consumption by reducing the need for redundant equipment or backup systems.

Improve customer loyalty

Telcos are facing heightened competition and shifting consumer behaviours, necessitating creative approaches to increase revenue and maintain customer expansion. One way is to bundle and aggregate popular streaming services by partnering with content platforms.

A telco cloud enables the integration – from delivery to billing – of various digital services, such as over-the-top (OTT) media content distribution, to significantly enhance the telco customer experience. 

Using AI-powered tools, telcos are also able to grow their revenues by predicting and preventing subscriber churn. A telco cloud delivers more agile cloud-centric monetisation platforms providing more insights to power the new generation of services.

Reduce costs

A telco cloud, when run at scale, reduces the capital expenditure required to support network infrastructure by enabling companies to utilise COTS hardware and pay only for the capacity they need, adjusting with usage changes, while leveraging the hybrid cloud.

This shift to operational expenditure is covered by the accompanying process automation enabled by Telco Cloud best practices and cloud-native application development methodologies, such as DevSecOps and CI/CD.

The highly resilient and automated architecture of the Telco Cloud also improves service availability and reduces the time to respond to faults and demand fluctuations.

What are the technical requirements for a telco cloud?

There are significant differences between your general purpose cloud environment and that of a telco cloud. With the exception of mission-critical applications, enterprise cloud deployments can tolerate less tight availability and performance requirements than those of telco network functions.

Some functions, such as the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), need to perform in real-time at the edge of the network, as close to the user equipment as possible, with the best throughput and latency. The five nines availability goal, a downtime of no more than 5.26 minutes per year, is also a given.

A telco cloud encompasses not only the telco central offices and edge locations, but also data centres spread across the network reach. It delivers its network functions and other workloads wherever they can be run in order to optimise efficiency and quality of experience.

Carrier-grade network requirements initially prevented moving network functions to the public cloud. With the improvement of multi cloud and hybrid cloud connectivity, more and more telcos are leveraging public cloud infrastructure for some of their telco cloud network functions. One significant advantage of the container technology used in cloud-native architecture is its portability. The microservices realising a network function and its dependencies are encapsulated in a single, self-contained unit that can run on any system that supports the container format.

One of the key conditions in achieving a successful implementation of a telco cloud is the need for business continuity and coexistence of cloud-native with existing legacy infrastructure. During a telco cloud deployment, companies need to be able to seamlessly migrate existing network services and applications in a coordinated manner. A good way to approach this challenge is to consider not only the infrastructure and product portfolio but also the organisation and its processes.

As with any project, there are several factors to evaluate when deploying a telco cloud:

• Whether to buy a complete solution or to do everything or part of it internally, with or without external support from a systems integrator.
• What amount should be invested upfront?
• How much risk is acceptable?
• What is the target time-to-market?
• How will success be defined and measured?

Some of the key decisions that telcos need to make include:

• Identifying the telco cloud services that need to redeveloped as microservices instead of migrated virtual machines (VMs).
• Selecting the right management and orchestration tools to support the efficient and effective automation of a telco cloud.
• Defining the rules that drive the hybrid cloud approach, depending on the economics, operational expertise and time-to-market requirements.
• Partnering and collaborating with technology companies, startups, and other organisations. This can help to access new technologies, markets, and expertise, and accelerate time-to-market

The path to a successful telco cloud deployment can be long and difficult but it is one of the key milestones for a telco to achieve its transition into a “techco” (technology-driven company) equipped to face competition from tech giants, media conglomerates and startups.

How can Canonical help you deploy a telco cloud?

In order to deploy a telco cloud effectively, companies need the tools that can support all their critical workloads wherever they run them, and enable them to incorporate innovators into the CSP network.

Canonical brings the power of open source cloud-native technologies to  the telco industry. A member of key telecommunications initiatives (such as the Open Networking Foundation, where we contribute to the Aether project, the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, the Sylva project, and ETSI), Canonical provides cloud platforms that support the deployment and operation of certified virtual and container network functions both for the 5G Core and RAN. We are a proven, trusted technology partner in the ecosystem, with years of experience in telco operations across the globe.

Canonical maintains a strong security posture by ensuring all published open source software is hardened, audited and certified to adhere to industry standards. This commitment extends to reducing the footprint of the OS and containers to minimise the attack surface.

This specific innovation also translates into efficiency gains that are significant in large-scale RAN deployments involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes.

Furthermore, Canonical’s robust automation tooling and 12 years long term support (LTS) not only streamline day 2 operations but also contribute to a competitive TCO making canonical the most economical vendor in the market.

Global top-tier operators endorse Canonical solutions for telcos. Our solutions encompass core, RAN and edge use cases and provide essential Enhanced Platform Awareness capabilities such as affinity and anti-affinity rules, CPU pinning, DPDK, Huge Pages, SR-IOV and secondary vNIC access, among others.

Groundwork starts with our tight partnerships with silicon vendors and independent hardware vendors that ensure Canonical provides the best silicon enablement and support for innovative technologies and acceleration capabilities.

Lastly, Canonical’s simple and unique Ubuntu Pro subscription offers the most comprehensive long term support, security and compliance for all your open source software. Using Canonical solutions, companies can operate carrier-grade cloud-native Telco Clouds at scale.

Learn more about Canonical solutions for telcos

Carrier-grade open source for telecommunications

Transform your infrastructure with secure and cloud-native telecom solutions

Further reading

Reduce 5G infrastructure costs with open source

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source

How a real-time kernel reduces latency in telco edge clouds

In December 2023, Canonical joined the Sylva project of Linux Foundation Europe to provide fully open-source and upstream telco platform solutions to the project. Sylva aims to tackle the fragmentation in telco cloud technologies and the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary platform solutions, by defining a common validation software framework for telco core and edge clouds. This framework captures the latest set of technical requirements from operators when running telco software workloads as cloud native functions (CNF), such as 5G core microservices and Open RAN software.

Sylva’s mission is to support 5G actors in their efforts to drive convergence of cloud technologies in the telco industry – taking into account interoperability across 5G components, TCO with open source software, compliance with regulations and adherence to high security standards. CNFs from vendor companies can then be operated and validated on reference implementations of the cloud software framework defined by Sylva. 

To test and validate telco vendor CNFs, Sylva has deployed cloud-native platforms based on a multi-deployment model as Kubernetes (K8s) clusters on bare metal or OpenStack. These CNFs often require telco-grade enhanced platform features like SR-IOV, DPDK, NUMA, and Hugepages, along with support for a range of container networking interfaces (CNI). In this blog, we explain how Canonical’s Sylva-compliant infrastructure solutions satisfy these requirements.

Canonical’s open source platform solutions for Sylva

Canonical’s product portfolio is closely aligned with Sylva’s objectives and strategies. It provides a variety of features that Sylva aims to include in the latest modern telecom infrastructure deployments. The project has already deployed validation platforms running on Ubuntu, and also leverages hardened Ubuntu 22.04 images.

Canonical Kubernetes is a CNCF conformant enterprise-grade Kubernetes with high-availability. It delivers the latest pure upstream Kubernetes, which has been fully tested across a variety of cloud platforms of all form factors, including provisioned bare metal systems, Equinix Metal and OpenStack, and architectures including x86, ARM, IBM POWER and IBM Z. It supports the Cluster API (CAPI), which is mandated by Sylva to provision Kubernetes. With CAPI, an operator can update Kubernetes clusters through rolling upgrades without disruption and initialise their workloads. 

For telco edge clouds, Canonical Kubernetes can scale as a lightweight Kubernetes solution with self-healing, high-availability and easy clustering properties. This provides a minimal footprint for more energy-efficient operations at edge clouds. It can equivalently scale up at regional and central clouds where a larger footprint is needed in a data centre. 

Based on Canonical Kubernetes, Canonical’s Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP) aligns with the Sylva platform features and architectural design. With CNEP, Kubernetes clusters are offered to telco operators on bare metal hardware, where hardware provisioning and cluster operations can both be controlled and orchestrated via Cluster API centrally. 

CNEP’s set of supported features makes it ideal for operators who want to adopt a Sylva compliant platform with validated telco CNFs from vendors, e.g. 5G core and Open RAN as well as MEC CNFs, such as content delivery networking (CDN) software. The platform software stack fully supports the Sylva design from bare metal to containers, with capabilities including:

• Bare metal provisioning operations automated via Cluster API
• Enhanced platform awareness features, such as SR-IOV, DPDK, CPU pinning, Hugepages and NUMA
• Ubuntu operating system with CIS security hardening, compliant with FIPS, NIST 800-53, PCI DSS, DISA STIG, ISO 270001 standards
• A real-time kernel for mission-critical applications and latency-sensitive telco workloads, such as Open RAN DU and 5G UPF
• Fully upstream and CNCF-compliant Canonical Kubernetes that provides operators with an industry-standard and production-grade Kubernetes container orchestration platform with multi-tenancy features, exposing Cluster API
• A wide range of CNIs, required by vendor CNFs and the Sylva validation framework, such as Cilium, Calico, Multus, and others
• Ceph as a backbone for distributed multi-tenant storage with configurable data protection and encryption
• Full observability, with support for the Canonical Observability Stack, consisting of popular open source software tools Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki, supporting logging, monitoring and alerting
• Role based access control (RBAC) features at platform, Kubernetes and bare metal provisioning levels

In addition to Canonical Kubernetes and our CNEP solution, Canonical OpenStack supports the advanced platform features that Sylva validation platforms need, including SR-IOV, DPDK, CPU-pinning, NUMA, Hugepages, PCI passthrough, and NVIDIA GPUs with virtualisation. It has native support for both Ceph and Cinder as storage components, both of which are included in the Sylva platform design and roadmap.

About the Sylva project 

Aligned with telco operator needs, Sylva envisions cloud-native telco software execution on Kubernetes platforms. Operators look to deploy Kubernetes clusters at their telco edge, regional and core clouds, providing them with a uniform cloud-native execution environment.

Modern telco infrastructure is distributed, deployed across multiple locations with tens of thousands of far-edge clouds, thousands of near-edge clouds and tens of regional clouds. This calls for deploying and managing a large number of Kubernetes workload clusters at geographically dispersed locations, controlled by management cluster(s) located at regional and central clouds. To tackle this challenge, Sylva has defined a software framework for telecom software platforms based on Kubernetes that are deployed on a large scale. 

Modern telco clouds must also support a set of enhanced platform features often required by telco CNFs. Towards this, the project’s validation platforms verify that (i) the deployment platform supports the requirements of a CNF in test, and (ii) the CNF can correctly deploy on the platform and successfully consume these platform features.

Kubernetes cluster management

Sylva follows a declarative approach with a GitOps framework to manage a high volume of physical nodes and Kubernetes clusters. Infrastructure lifecycle management covers Day 0 (build and deploy), Day 1(run), Day 2(operate) operations, with fault management, updates and upgrades. The project provides automation with CI/CD pipelines where a set of scripts produce and maintain Helm charts that include Kubernetes deployment and operational resource definitions. 

A dedicated work group, called Telco Cloud Stack, has developed tooling for cluster deployment and lifecycle management (LCM). This tooling is based on the Flux GitOps tool, which keeps clusters and infrastructure components in sync with their definitions in Git repositories. 

To manage the Kubernetes clusters and bare metal provisioning with this tool-chain, Sylva leverages Cluster API (CAPI).

Validation of telco CNFs on Sylva platforms

CNFs from different vendors are validated on Sylva platforms for the interoperability between the CNFs and the platforms. The project’s validation program ensures that telco operators who deploy platforms with software components that follow the Sylva reference implementations gain two benefits: (i) verified telco CNF functionality on their cloud platforms, and (ii) verified support for the telco-grade platform features which these CNFs require.

The project has a dedicated work group called the Sylva Validation Center, which tests deployment of vendor CNFs on the project’s validation platforms, where Kubernetes runs on either bare metal hardware or on OpenStack. 

The validation of a CNF under test on a Sylva platform starts with identifying the necessary set of platform capabilities that the CNF requires, including CNIs, and then installing and configuring the platform with those capabilities. Once the platform has been configured, a first set of smoke tests are run to verify the platform’s support for this set of features. Once the CNF has been deployed on the platform, some functional tests are performed to verify that the deployment is correctly done, and all the necessary Kubernetes pods are healthy in ready state. Finally, operators may run additional tests on CNFs if deemed necessary.

Canonical’s open source software and solutions meet the platform feature requirements by telco CNFs as tested by the Sylva Validation Center, such as SR-IOV, Multus CNI, and Real-time Linux. Validating telco CNFs on Canonical’s platforms for Sylva will also ensure that our platforms with support for these advanced features are verified by Sylva to run these CNFs.

Sylva platform roadmap

In its roadmap for 2024, project Sylva is planning to add support for new features in its validation platforms, such as near real-time Linux, immutable operating system for far-edge clouds and GPU offloads. Canonical’s software platforms follow Sylva’s vision and have support for these features already today, with Real-time Ubuntu, Ubuntu Core immutable OS, support for precision time protocol (PTP) and more.

Canonical is committed to making Sylva a benchmark platform for executing telco network functions. This commitment entails Canonical’s contribution to the infrastructure-as-code scripts that compose Sylva, to enable our open source solutions for Sylva, and to align with the evolving technical scope of the project.

Summary

Linux Foundation Europe’s Sylva project has defined a platform architecture for validating cloud-native telco network functions on Kubernetes. This provides telco operators with guidance on how to achieve a uniform cloud infrastructure, covering edge, regional and central cloud locations, ultimately aiming at multiple objectives, including cost reduction, interoperability, automation, compliance and security.

The project emphasises the central role of open source platforms with standard and open APIs, which brings a modular approach when designing and deploying telco cloud systems. 

Canonical offers fully upstream and telco-grade open source solutions that align with the Sylva platform architecture, including Canonical Kubernetes and Canonical OpenStack. We also engineered an innovative platform solution, CNEP, which is fully inline with the Sylva visions on multi-tenancy, multi-site Kubernetes clusters,  bare metal with full automation of hardware provisioning and cluster lifecycle management performed over industry-standard Cluster API.

Contact us

Canonical provides a full stack for your telecom infrastructure. To learn more about our telco solutions, visit our webpage at ubuntu.com/telco.

Further reading

Canonical joins the Sylva project

Bringing automation to telco edge clouds at scale

Canonical Kubernetes 1.29 is now generally available

Fast and reliable telco edge clouds with Intel FlexRAN and Real-time Ubuntu for 5G URLLC scenarios

Canonical and Spectro Cloud have collaborated to develop an effective telco edge cloud solution, Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP). CNEP is built with Canonical’s open source infrastructure solutions and Spectro Cloud’s Palette containers-as-a-service (CaaS) platform. This technology stack empowers operators to benefit from the cost optimisation and agility improvements delivered by edge clouds in a highly secure and performant way.

Through a single pane of glass provided by Spectro Cloud Palette, operators can deploy, configure and manage all their telco edge clouds centrally, taking full advantage of Canonical’s infrastructure technology. The joint solution brings automation to deployment and maintenance operations at scale and enables fully cloud-native telco edge clouds.

Telco edge clouds

With the softwarisation of network services and the adoption of cloud computing in the telco sector, the architecture of mobile networks has evolved significantly. Modern telecom networks are no longer run by all-in-one systems deployed at a central location. Instead, operators can scale their systems and offer their services closer to users, thanks to highly scalable, distributed and cloud-native architectures.

Telco operators increasingly deploy cloud computing systems at the edge of their networks, which are often referred to as edge clouds. According to the IDC spending guide forecast published in February 2023, service providers will invest more than $44 billion in enabling edge offerings in 2023. This trend has emerged due to the change in infrastructure architecture and the evolution of mobile networking software which is now based on components that run on containers as microservices. 

Edge computing is predicted to grow even more, as the technology has brought efficiency, flexibility and scalability to telecom systems in deployment and operation. STL partner’s revenue forecast notes a prediction of $445bn in global demand for edge computing services in 2030. 

Five key requirements for edge cloud success in telco 

To unlock the benefits of cloud computing, operators need an effective infrastructure stack to host cloud-native software on edge clouds. Telco deployments are highly demanding, and so a suitable infrastructure stack should satisfy these five key requirements: 

Autonomous operations

It is critical to minimise operational maintenance for edge clouds. These clouds are large in number, and it is costly to maintain systems manually, especially when they are deployed close to radio equipment where it is impractical for administrators to visit deployment sites physically. The solution is to ensure that edge clouds can be operated in an autonomous manner.

Secure

Telco networks are part of our critical infrastructure, carrying sensitive user data. Systems must comply with all necessary security standards and have hardening measures to safeguard user information.

Minimal but variable in size

A minimal footprint is one of the defining characteristics of an edge cloud. A few server hardware nodes may be all that is needed to set up a small cloud that would run a number of cell sites. That being said, there is no single-size solution – requirements may change based on what an operator intends to run at its edge network. Therefore, infrastructure must be able to scale as and when needed.

Energy efficient

A telco operator typically runs a large number of sites for its radio networks. Even a 2% reduction in energy consumption translates to significant cost savings. This means that the ideal edge cloud solution must be optimised at every layer of its stack and have features that support running and operating only what is needed with no extras. It should also support advanced hardware and software features to reduce power consumption.

Highly performant

Telco networks must deliver user data quickly and reliably – service quality and reliability depends on it. Solutions at the telco edge must support the latest technology and enhanced features that enable faster delivery of information at every layer of the hardware and software stack.

Challenges

Edge clouds need a software stack that is built with multiple virtualisation technologies, which makes it challenging to integrate and set up a fully functional system. Addressing the five requirements mentioned above with modern open source cloud technologies is a complex task. Despite the clear benefits those technologies bring, there still gaps to fill. Canonical and SpectroCloud worked together to fill these gaps and make the usage of those open source technologies easier and telco-grade. 

Maintaining updates and upgrades in a cloud system is of paramount importance for smooth system operation while ensuring system integrity and security. However, a typical distributed telecom system deployment has many edge sites each running a virtualisation infrastructure. Furthermore, both the virtualisation software and the application workloads that run on a cloud environment have a large set of dependencies. Given this scale and complexity, it is simply not feasible to manually perform updates and upgrades to maintain these systems.

Besides updates and upgrades, operational procedures such as deployment, scaling and runtime maintenance, are highly repetitive across all telco edge cloud sites. Without a scalable system, it is not possible to operate a telco-edge infrastructure in a cost-efficient way.

Automating telco edge clouds at scale

Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP), the solution by Canonical and Spectro Cloud, addresses the five key requirements of successful edge clouds when deploying and maintaining their distributed telco cloud infrastructure. It offers a software stack that is efficient, secure, performant and modular.

The technology stack

The solution stack is tailored for the needs of telco edge clouds from bare metal to containers. It consists of Canonical’s Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) and MicroK8s solutions that together deliver the bare metal performance and orchestration required by the telecom sector while enabling the flexibility and agility of cloud native environments. Integrated with Spectro Cloud’s Palette, the solution provides automation for deployment of Canonical’s cloud native edge cloud stack at scale at multiple edge sites.

Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP)

Platform features

This resulting solution, named Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP) simplifies onboarding, deployment and management of MicroK8s clusters. MicroK8s is a light-weight, zero-ops and purely upstream CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution by Canonical, with high availability, automatic updates and streamlined upgrades. It is the container orchestrator in CNEP, tailored for telco edge clouds, with optimised performance, scalability, reliability, power efficiency and security. 

CNEP offers an array of features that make it ideally suited to telco use cases.

Multi-site automation

CNEP provides multi-site control, observability, governance and orchestration with zero-downtime upgrades. Through Spectro Cloud Palette, operators can seamlessly deploy, configure and manage all their telco edge clouds from a central location.

Palette not only manages bare metal automation and provisioning with MAAS but also achieves deployment and management of MicroK8s clusters, all through Cluster API (CAPI). It gives operators rich and fine-grained control over their Day 2 operations, such as patching and configuration changes. The platform also provides full observability and role based access control (RBAC) capabilities.

Repeatable deployments

In CNEP, operators can achieve repeatable and reliable MicroK8s cluster deployments with automation at scale using Palette across multiple geographical sites. With Palette, CNEP achieves decentralised policy enforcement and self-healing for autonomy and resilience at scale. This provides operators with a consistent end-to-end declarative management experience.

Self-healing by Palette in CNEP is achieved by continuously monitoring the state of the deployed MicroK8s cluster at each site and comparing it against the desired cluster state. Any deviation between the two states is addressed by bringing the cluster to the desired state based on policies.

Cloud native, reliable and software defined

CNEP is cloud native and reliable for containerised workloads. MicroK8s supports Cluster API to meet the complex needs of highly distributed edge node onboarding, secure deployment and substrate provisioning. It also supports all popular container networking interfaces (CNI), including Cilium, Calico and Flannel, as well as Kube-OVN as a CNI for software defined networking. 

For management and control of object, block and file storage, MicroK8s integrates with Canonical Charmed Ceph, which is a flexible software-defined storage controller solution. CNEP provides support for these CNIs and Charmed Ceph out of the box.

Automated hardware at scale

Bare metal hardware provisioning with MAAS enables operators to automate their edge hardware infrastructure, and gain visibility and control over their hardware resources. This provides agility in system deployment with full automation in configuration and operating system deployment. 

MAAS supports CAPI to enable hardware automation operations while deploying and managing MicroK8s clusters. With Palette, CNEP achieves bare metal automation at scale across multiple edge cloud sites through MAAS CAPI.

Secure and compliant

Ubuntu Pro provides security compliance, hardening and auditing, as well as support to the edge cloud infrastructure as a whole and to the cloud native telco workloads running in containers. It provides security patches, hardening profiles, standards compliance and automated CVE patches for an extensive set of open source packages (over 23000). CNEP supports multiple security standards. For instance, both Ubuntu Pro and Palette have conformance to FIPS 140-2.

As CNEP’s container orchestrator, MicroK8s security is mission-critical, and our solution ensures that it is safeguarded. In addition to the security features of Ubuntu Pro, MicroK8s runs in a snap, which is a confined execution environment, effectively isolating it from changes in the host system and other software running on the host. This provides a sandbox environment and protects the container orchestration environment from external threats.

The attack surface is reduced as much as possible to minimise entry points to the platform and protect it from malicious attempts. This is achieved by the opinionated design of MicroK8s, chiselled container images and Ubuntu Core.

MicroK8s has a minimal footprint that includes all necessary components but nothing extra. It is easily extensible with its modular structure as needed. Similarly, chiselled container images include only the packages needed to execute your business applications, without any additional operating system packages or libraries. In constrained environments, Ubuntu has a minimal flavour – Ubuntu Core. This provides operators with an immutable operational environment where the system runs on containerised snaps. 

Besides the security features provided by Canonical’s telco edge cloud stack at each telco site, Spectro Cloud Palette brings additional security capabilities to CNEP. This includes native security scanning for the full deployment stack, conformance scans, and penetration testing. Palette provides further patching and monitoring capabilities, along with role based access control offered as part of CNEP.

Performant

CNEP is highly-performant across the telco infrastructure stack.

At the container orchestration level, MicroK8s supports the latest enhanced platform features that streamline packet delivery between containerised applications and external services. It supports technologies such as GPU acceleration and CPU-pinning.

At the operating system level, Ubuntu Pro brings real-time compute capabilities that meet the stringent requirements of delay-sensitive telco applications and the networking stack. This enables low latency and ultra-reliable communications, which means applications can communicate with users and devices with the fastest possible performance at the OS level.

CNEP runs on bare metal hardware, which makes it ideal for efficiency at the telco edge. Automatic updates provided by Ubuntu Pro’s kernel Livepatch service gives an uninterrupted environment to telco workloads and the networking stack.

Cost-efficient

CNEP is designed to be efficient with minimal energy consumption at the telco edge. 

MicroK8s is modular and can be extensible as necessary; it comes with a sensible set of default modules in place. This enables MicroK8s to be more efficient with the best possible use of system resources. 

Ubuntu Core has the same properties. It is minimal, with services running on snaps, providing a small footprint which consumes much less resources without sacrificing performance.

MAAS enables significant cost reductions on two aspects thanks to its hardware automation capabilities. On one hand, MAAS automates OS provisioning and software deployment on bare metal hardware, reducing operational costs and human errors. On the other hand, system administrators can optimise hardware utilisation based on workload conditions managed by MAAS.

Those automation features are augmented by the multi-site automation capabilities brought by Palette. CNEP achieves cost savings in terms of simplified deployment and management of the edge infrastructure, as engineers no longer need to physically visit deployment sites.

Summary

We are proud to be working alongside Spectro Cloud to introduce CNEP to the market. Powered by Canonical’s industry-leading open source infrastructure solutions, and with automation provided by Palette, CNEP can seamlessly scale across multi-site distributed infrastructure. It is ideal for cloud native telco workloads, edge computing business applications, and mobile networking stack, such as Open RAN CU/DU/RU and distributed 5G user plane. The solution is secure by design thanks to Ubuntu Pro, and highly efficient with support for real-time kernel and other enhanced platform features.

Get in touch 

Canonical provides a full stack for your telecom infrastructure. To learn more about our telco solutions, visit our webpage at ubuntu.com/telco or get in touch.

Learn more

Reducing latency at telco edge clouds with Ubuntu real-time kernel

Safeguarding your telco infrastructure with Ubuntu Pro

How to build carrier-grade infrastructure using enterprise open source solutions

On-demand webinar: Kubernetes on bare metal: ready for prime time!