StarlingX is available in its 7.0 release today. StarlingX
combines Ceph, OpenStack, Kubernetes and more to create a full-featured cloud
software stack that provides everything telecom carriers and enterprises need
to deploy an edge cloud on a few servers or hundreds of them. StarlingX is used
by the most demanding applications in industrial IOT, telecom, video delivery
and other ultra-low latency use cases.
***Download StarlingX 7.0 at https://opendev.org/starlingx***
"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.