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Airship 1.0 marries Kubernetes and OpenStack for 5G’s good

Published

3 years ago

May 3, 2019

In Denver, Colo., at Open Infrastructure Summit, formerly the OpenStack Summit, the OpenStack Foundation announced that Airship 1.0, a set of open-source tools for automating cloud provisioning and management, has been released. Airship provides a declarative framework for defining and managing open infrastructure tools and their underlying hardware. These tools include OpenStack for virtual machines, Kubernetes for container orchestration, and Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) for bare metal, with planned support for OpenStack Ironic.

By design, Airship has four goals:

Use a declarative architecture: Sites are declared using YAML. This includes both hard assets such as network configuration and bare-metal hosts as well as soft assets like Helm charts, their overrides, and container images. You manage the document and Airship implements it.
A single workflow for life-cycle management: We needed a system with predictable life-cycle management at its core. This meant ensuring we had one workflow that handled both initial deployments and future site updates. In other words, there should be virtually nothing different when interacting with a new deployment or providing an update to an existing site.
Containers are the only unit of software delivery: Containers are the unit of software delivery for Airship. Everything is a container. This allows us to progress environments from development, to testing, and finally to production with confidence.
Flexible for different architectures and software: Airship is delivering environments both very small and large with a wide range of configurations. We use Airship to manage our entire cloud platform, not just OpenStack.

Special feature

How 5G Will Transform Business

5G will be popularized via telecom carriers and the marketing of wire-cutting services, but the biggest impact and returns will come from connecting the Internet of things, edge computing and analytics infrastructure with minimal latency.

While Airshop will make complex infrastructure cloud building easier for everyone, job one is to build a robust delivery mechanism for organizations that need to embrace containers as the new unit of infrastructure delivery at scale. Specifically, that means telecoms, such as one of Airship’s primary builder: AT&T.

Airship will make it easier to deliver 5G infrastructure programs, such as: Software Defined Networks (SDN), Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), Virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), Virtualized Radio Access Network (VRAN) backhaul, traffic shaping services, customer usage tracking, smart voicemail, video streaming, and consumer-facing services.

Starting from bare metal, Airship will let companies manage your software-defined infrastructure life-cycle with a production-grade Kubernetes cluster working in concert with OpenStack Helm-deployed artifacts. It does this by enabling sysadmins to manage their infrastructure deployments and life-cycle through declarative YAML documents. Thus, Airship can handle both your initial deployments and their updates.

This isn’t just a batch of half-baked code. Ryan van Wyk, AT&T’s assistant vice president of Network Cloud Software Engineering, said: “AT&T has been using Airship in our production network since last December.” AT&T is powering its 5G rollouts on an Airship-based, containerized OpenStack cloud.

AT&T isn’t the only one deploying Airship. Matthew Johns, SUSE‘s product and solutions marketing manager, said: “We are already using Airship for life cycle management as a key part of our plans for future releases of SUSE OpenStack Cloud. As active contributors to OpenStack, we are also active in the Airship community and part of that means making open source easier. Airship helps us do that.”

Finally, Ericsson is demoing a virtualized Radio Access Network (VRAN) on an Airship-based containerized OpenStack cloud

Want to see it for yourself? You can download Airship 1.0 or run a trial version of Airship for a single node on Ubuntu Linux.

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Biden Is Giving Apple’s Steve Jobs An Incredible Posthumous Award

Published

2 days ago

July 1, 2022

Francisco Peguero

Jobs, who co-founded the technology company Apple Inc., was arguably one of the most influential figures in the world of technology. Dubbed a visionary, he was credited with being the driving force behind several products and ideas that have shaped the modern world. It was under Jobs’ leadership that Apple came up with revolutionary products like the iPod, Mac computers, and perhaps, his single most important contribution to the world of consumer technology; the almighty iPhone.

After Jobs debuted the first-generation iPhone in 2007, he pretty much set the tone for the evolution of the modern smartphone. Even in 2022, more than a decade after his passing, the modern smartphone continues to base themselves on the blueprint and form factor that Jobs created. Needless to say, he has often been hailed as the harbinger of the smartphone revolution — one that directly and indirectly transformed the lives of millions of people across the globe.

When Steve Jobs is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7, for many of his fans and followers, it will serve as a moment of reflection for such an impactful figure in technological history.

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GM Built 95,000 Vehicles It Can’t Sell

Published

2 days ago

July 1, 2022

Francisco Peguero

In its earnings report, sales across all GM-owned brands are not expected to slow down any time soon, despite the roughly 95,000 vehicles that can’t be sold. GM noted in an SEC filing report from July 1 that these vehicles will be finished in the latter half of 2022, as semiconductors begin to flood back into the market. This could happen sooner, as reports since late April have claimed the shortage is now down to a transport logistics issue rather than a silicon supply issue.

GM highlighted in its report that its third quarter could provide a strong boost to its market share, reflective of growing demand for its vehicles. The company cited a 29% year-over-year increase to sales figures across commercial, government, and rental sectors.

The car manufacturer broke its projections down further, claiming that the commercial demand for midsize pickups saw an increase of 65%, while other vehicle groups enjoyed a 12 to 14% boost. Electric vehicles were also mentioned in the report. Over 7,300 electric vehicles were sold in the second quarter of 2022, which included the GMC Hummer EV Pickup, Chevrolet Bolt EV, and BrightDrop Zevo 600 van. However, these sales figures might have looked more hopeful for the future of EV, if the semiconductor chip shortage not been an obstacle. As of June 30, the company reported 247,839 vehicles (or about 152,839 after you subtract the 95,000 unfinished vehicles) were stored in its collective inventory, many of which were already on their way to retailers.