Open Infrastructure Foundation kondigt StarlingX 7.0 aan met verbeterde security, flexibiliteit en scalability

StarlingX – het open source edge computing en IoT cloud platform voor low-latency en high-perfor­mance appli­ca­ties – kondigt de beschik­baar­heid van release 7.0 aan. StarlingX combi­neert Ceph, OpenStack, Kuber­netes en meer om een full-featured cloud software stack te creëren die alles biedt wat telecom carriers en bedrijven nodig hebben om een edge cloud in te zetten. StarlingX wordt gebruikt door de meest veel­ei­sende toepas­singen in indu­striële IOT, telecom, video delivery en andere ultra-low latency use cases.

Meer info is hieronder in het Engels te lezen:

StarlingX—open source, full-stack, distri­buted cloud platform for IoT, 5G, O‑RAN and edge computing—is in produc­tion with T‑Systems, Verizon, Vodafone and others

“It is very exciting to see StarlingX deliver on the high demands of edge use cases in produc­tion,” said Ildikó Váncsa, Senior Manager, Community & Ecosystem, for the Open Infra­struc­ture Foun­da­tion. “Operators, such as Verizon, Vodafone, Elisa, KDDI, NTT Docomo, and more, are relying on the platform to securely provide high bandwidth, low latency connec­tions on distri­buted devices at all times. While these charac­te­ris­tics are crucial for virtual and Open RAN deploy­ments, they also make StarlingX the ideal platform for inno­va­tions like auto­no­mous vehicles, smart cities, augmented reality, manu­fac­tu­ring, drone delivery, and remote heal­th­care to become reality. Open source StarlingX is a proven solution for edge appli­ca­tions with commer­cial deploy­ments around the globe. The StarlingX community is working dili­gently to expand the capa­bi­li­ties of the platform with each release, and StarlingX 7.0 is a prime example; it features enhan­ce­ments that improve scala­bi­lity, enhance security and stability, and provide further flexi­bi­lity for users.”

Key Features of StarlingX 7.0

To further support the low-latency and distri­buted cloud requi­re­ments of edge computing and indu­strial IoT use cases, the community prio­ri­tized these enhan­ce­ments in StarlingX 7.0:

Improved scala­bi­lity 
- To support a wider variety of edge use cases, StarlingX 7.0 increases the number of subclouds that the Distri­buted Cloud archi­tec­ture can manage. Since the size of edge infra­struc­tures can grow quite large, the community is conti­nuously working on incre­a­sing the number of subclouds that the platform can support. For instance, the 7.0 version of the platform can handle up to 1000 All-in-One Simplex (AOI-SX) subclouds.StarlingX 7.0 inte­grates Istio service mesh to enhance Kuber­netes in areas such as obser­va­bi­lity, traffic mana­ge­ment, security and policy management.

Enhanced security and stability
- StarlingX 7.0 includes support for security audit logging to capture commands that were executed using the REST API of the platform services, including using SNMP. The func­ti­o­na­lity is also available for the Kuber­netes component of StarlingX with the option to configure at bootstrap time. This feature helps with iden­ti­fying any suspi­cious activity and applying preven­tive measures.
- The community took the first steps to replace Pod Security Policies (PSP) with Pod Security Admission Controller for Kuber­netes. With this change, the platform has a more efficient and reliable solution to enforce pod security standards.

Greater flexi­bi­lity to manage a diverse set of decen­tra­lized workloads
- Upgraded PTP Dual NIC Support Boundary Clock Confi­gu­ra­tion: The community upgraded base PTP packages in the 7.0 release. This provides much more fine grained confi­gu­ra­tion options for this feature with which users can now set host-level prefe­rences. This impro­ve­ment highly increases the mana­ge­a­bi­lity of the platform in an area that is crucial for real-time appli­ca­tions in industry segments such as tele­com­mu­ni­ca­tions, manu­fac­tu­ring and more

- Enhanced PTP features to support 5G Time SyncE Solution: For many 5G appli­ca­tions, clock synchro­ni­za­tion is essential for correct operation. This feature extends the PTP features of StarlingX to support the confi­gu­ra­tion of NICs which provide Synchro­nous Ethernet (SyncE) support. It also enables users to create a new PTP instance type called ‘clock.’

- Enhan­ce­ments to Subcloud Local Instal­la­tion feature: This feature was added in an earlier release to provide further flexi­bi­lity to deploy the end-to-end edge infra­struc­ture and remove depen­den­cies such as network connec­tion and available bandwidth. The 7.0 release increases the effi­ci­ency and stability of the feature.

Other Enhan­ce­ments

Debian OS Migration: In StarlingX 7.0, the base operating system has been shifted from CentOS to Debian Stable Release. Debian is a widely known and well-tested open source Linux distri­bu­tion with long-term main­tenance. Distri­buted Cloud Horizon Orches­tra­tion Updates: In this version, the Horizon web interface allows users to upgrade compo­nents throug­hout the Distri­buted Cloud archi­tec­ture such as Kuber­netes, device/​firmware image and more.This version of the platform also updates Kuber­netes to the 1.23.1 version and uses that as default.

Learn more about these and other features of StarlingX 7.0 in the community’s release notes.

OpenInfra Community Drives StarlingX Progress

The StarlingX project launched in 2018, with initial code for the project contri­buted by Wind River and Intel. Active contri­bu­tors to the project include Wind River, Intel and 99Cloud. Well-known users of the software in produc­tion include T‑Systems, Verizon and Vodafone. The StarlingX community is actively colla­bo­ra­ting with several other groups such as the OpenInfra Edge Computing Group, ONAP, the O‑RAN Software Community (SC), Akraino and more.