Containers or VMs? Wind River Studio OpenStack Lets You Have Both

By Carlos Santamaria

Increasingly the market is turning to containers for new developments in telecommunications and other industries, particularly for intelligent edge cloud use cases. For the demanding needs of these edge clouds, we have the Wind River Studio cloud platform which is the open source, production-grade distributed Kubernetes solution for managing edge cloud infrastructure, based on the StarlingX project. This is the infrastructure being used by T-Systems, Verizon, and Vodafone for their industrial edge networks, 5G, and Open RAN deployments respectively.

Even though containers are getting most of the attention for new projects, VMs have provided tried-and-true critical infrastructure and are likely to continue for some time. With this release of OpenStack capabilities within Wind River Studio, Wind River provides a solution to converge containers on bare metal with a containerized OpenStack on the same architecture enabling operators to flexibly migrate within the same product.

Wind River Studio OpenStack is ideally suited for high performance edge use cases and includes the following key capabilities:

● Hybrid-Ready:   Wind River Studio OpenStack is deployable as a hybrid solution with Wind River Studio. Operators can leverage both containers and VMs on the same system. It is also deployable on Wind River Studio sub-clouds in a Distributed Cloud solution

● High Performance Data Path: For low-latency applications, Studio OpenStack leverages an Accelerated Virtual Switch (AVS) that provides superior data path performance over Open Virtual Switch (OVS). It also provides support for PCI-passthrough and SRIOV vNICS to achieve bare metal performance

●  Small Footprint with Scalability: Is deployable on a single server and scales in-service from single server to up to 8 servers

●  Ease of Install / Ease of Configuration: You can deploy Studio OpenStack in default configuration with 2x CLI commands, and you can customize any OpenStack service via Helm Chart overrides.

Some new features with Wind River Studio OpenStack 21.07 include

●  Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Enhancements

●  NFS backend for Cinder backup and restore

●  Support of incremental backup for Cinder volumes for both NFS and CEPH backends

●  NOVA support for dedicated and shared CPUs on the same host

●  NOVA improved scheduling error messages

●  Auto-refresh support for Horizon (GUI)

●  Horizon Flavor Metadata Update Form

●  Support for up to 1 journal disk + 6 Ceph object store devices (OSDs) per server in All-in-one duplex (AIO-DX)

With this release of OpenStack, Wind River provides the essential infrastructure for today with a path toward containers in the future, making Wind River Studio the “future-proof” cloud platform of choice for running both containers and VMs when it comes mission critical applications.

If you would like to join us in our journey, please contact us.

If you are interested to learn more about the role open-source plays in edge cloud computing, check out our “Future of Distributed Cloud” web site to learn about the five key elements you need to consider when building a distributed cloud.