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:

Star​lingX—open source, full-stack, distri­buted cloud platform for IoT, 5G, O‑RAN and edge compu​ting—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 commu​ni​ty’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.