Airship launched by AT&T and SK Telecom

AT&T and SK Telecom have jointly announced the launch of a new open infrastructure project called Airship, intended to simplify the process of deploying cloud infrastructure.

Airship uses the OpenStack-Helm project as a foundation, building a collection of open source tools to allow operators, IT service providers or enterprise organizations to more easily deploy and manage OpenStack, focusing more specifically on container technologies like Kubernetes and Helm. The mission statement is a simple one; make it easier to more predictably build and manage cloud infrastructure.

“Airship gives cloud operators a capability to manage sites at every stage from creation through all the updates, including baremetal installation, OpenStack creation, configuration changes and OpenStack upgrades,” SK Telecom said in a statement. “It does all this through a unified, declarative, fully containerized, and cloud-native platform.”

The initial focus of this project is the implementation of a declarative platform to introduce OpenStack on Kubernetes (OOK) and the lifecycle management of the resulting cloud, with the scale, speed, resiliency, flexibility, and operational predictability demanded of network clouds. The idea of a declarative platform is every aspect of the cloud is defined in standardized documents, where the user manages the documents themselves, submits them and lets the platform takes care of the rest.

The Airship initiative will initially consist of eight sub-projects:

“Airship is going to allow AT&T and other operators to deliver cloud infrastructure predictably that is 100% declarative, where Day Zero is managed the same as future updates via a single unified workflow, and where absolutely everything is a container from the bare metal up,” said Ryan van Wyk, Assistant VP of Cloud Platform Development at AT&T Labs.

While the emergence of another open source project is nothing too revolutionary, AT&T has stated it will act as the foundation of its network cloud that will power the 5G core supporting the 2018 launch of 5G service in 12 cities. Airship will also be used by Akraino Edge Stack, another project which intends to create an open source software stack supporting high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications. Two early use-cases certainly add an element of credibility.