“As members of the Linux Foundation and coordinators of the Open Source Meta-Orchestration Platform (OSMOP.EU) within the upcoming IPCEI-CIS, we are really excited to see European telcos and vendors gradually converging around the principles of the 2021 OpenNebula Manifesto for Europe’s Next-Generation Edge Cloud.”

– Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO of OpenNebula Systems

Linux Foundation Europe has recently announced the creation of the Sylva open source project, aimed at reducing the fragmentation of the European Telco Cloud infrastructure. The project has been launched by five major European carriers (Telefónica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom) plus two iconic vendors (Ericsson and Nokia). We at OpenNebula Systems celebrate this collective effort to integrate the foundational framework for a common infrastructure among European 5G/telecom operators, allowing the federation and integration of edge applications.

Although Project Sylva is focused on a higher layer of the cloud software stack than OpenNebula, we are thrilled to see that the underlying architecture is fully aligned with the vision and edge deployment model that OpenNebula Systems has been advocating for and defining through highly innovative EU-funded projects like ONEedge (2019-2022). Shared concepts like distributed edge-cloud computing and bare-metal provisioning have now become native features in OpenNebula and are the fundamental basis of our approach to the technological challenges that lie ahead.

Sylva Objectives	OpenNebula Features
Enhanced performance support	OpenNebula already implements Enhancement Platform Awareness (EPA) features that enable the fine-grained matching of processor capabilities, exposing low-level CPU and NIC acceleration components to the VNF. This includes DPDK and SR-IOV.
GPU hardware support	GPU support in OpenNebula is already available either through generic PCI Passthrough or through NVIDIA vGPU proprietary drivers.
Bare-metal automation provisioning	OpenNebula’s Edge Cloud Architecture provides out-of-the-box a comprehensive bare-metal provisioning mechanism by fully automating the lifecycle of OpenNebula clusters using on-prem hardware and bare-metal offerings of different cloud/edge infrastructure providers.
Multi-clustering support	OpenNebula already supports distributed automation and management of multiple clusters across different bare-metal cloud/edge locations simultaneously through the OneProvision engine, as well as the automated deployment of front-end instances using GitOps techniques (e.g. through our Edge-as-a-Service platform Edgify).  The management of multi-cluster Kubernetes is supported through the OpenNebula Kubernetes Engine (OneKE). This, coupled with the OneProvision engine, allows the management of several Kubernetes clusters in different locations using a single OpenNebula instance.
Enhanced security	OpenNebula comes with strong multi-tenant capabilities, including Virtual Datacenters, Virtual Network isolation, and powerful RBAC capabilities (including ACLs). A mechanism is present to cipher arbitrary data based on a special key generated in the OpenNebula DB bootstrap.
Lightweight (e.g. all in 1 server)	OpenNebula has traditionally exhibited an extremely low memory and CPU footprint while being able to manage large-scale infrastructures with thousands of servers.
Energy efficiency	The implementation of energy efficiency scheduling policies requires integration with hardware energy efficiency features and monitoring.

OpenNebula has become the only European open source cloud & edge computing platform in the market, and a core component in a number of high-impact EU initiatives designed to create a next-generation, vendor-neutral, multi-provider edge cloud for Europe (including the upcoming IPCEI-CIS). Our Telco Cloud solution is present in several deployments in the evaluation of multiple use cases. As open source developers, we are looking forward to incorporating the tangible outcomes of the Sylva project into our technology, and to exploring together how the requirements for Telcos defined by the project may help us improve the way in which our Telco customers use some of the advanced features already provided by OpenNebula.

🚀 About OpenNebula Systems
Apart from being a corporate member of the Linux Foundation, the CNCF, the LF Edge Foundation, Gaia-X, and the 6G Smart Networks & Services Industry Association (6G-IA), OpenNebula Systems chairs the Cloud/Edge Working Group of the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud while supporting several EU-funded projects aimed at building the future cognitive cloud (e.g. SovereignEdge/Cognit) and Telco solutions for advanced 5G and 6G (e.g. 6G-SANDBOX).
For more information about our innovation in Telco Cloud & Edge Computing, visit OpenNebula.io/innovation