Red Hat and Sylva unify the future for telco cloud

The telecommunications service provider landscape continues to be rewritten with the coming of 5G Advanced, edge computing, automation, and AI. But realizing their full potential demands a continued shift in infrastructure for service providers to be more agile and efficient. Cloud-native architectures and open source principles have emerged as the path forward, offering the flexibility and speed needed to differentiate from offering pure connectivity. Yet, a significant challenge of fragmentation persists thanks to complex islands of legacy infrastructure and technical debt that have built up over the years. For service providers, this involves managing multiple stacks and skill sets. For vendors, it means costly, time-consuming certifications against numerous platforms. The industry is looking for ways to reduce operational costs, speed up service rollouts to drive new revenue, and capitalize on the full agility that cloud-native technologies and methodologies promise.

Introducing Sylva

Sylva is an open source project initiated by five of Europe’s largest service providers, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefónica, and Telecom Italia, along with network providers Ericsson and Nokia, and has expanded to include many more participants. Its objective is to release a cloud software framework tailored for telco and edge requirements and a reference implementation and validation program to implement it. 

By converging the cloud layer around open source components with Kubernetes at its core, Sylva eliminates fragmentation. It establishes a single, validated foundation upon which network functions can be certified once and run anywhere, reducing complexity and unlocking the operational agility service providers desperately need. This “develop once, deploy anywhere” model is Red Hat’s core proposition and our hybrid cloud platforms align directly with the goals of Sylva. 

Red Hat OpenShift achieves Sylva 1.5 Compliance

To bring Red Hat into the Sylva framework, our engineering teams have worked closely together over recent months and we are pleased to confirm that Red Hat OpenShift is fully deployable with the newly released Sylva 1.5. 

This collaboration ensures that Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, is a deeply integrated and validated choice for Sylva deployments. Key technical contributions from Red Hat include new bare metal provisioning capabilities for flexible deployment and scaling, alongside enhanced security features built directly into the Sylva framework.

Red Hat OpenShift provides a common cloud-native platform for all our customers worldwide. This means that the feature advancements driven by Sylva compatibility can benefit all users, across any industry. 

Efficiency, choice and speed

The true power of this integration is measured not in code, but in concrete business advantage. For service provider leaders, adopting a Sylva-compliant common cloud-native platform from Red Hat translates directly into a more competitive and efficient operation. It begins with significant cost optimization: by leveraging Sylva’s shared community model, service providers consolidate development, testing and certification expenses. This means they inherit an extensive, pre-validated partner ecosystem, eliminating redundant testing and accelerating time-to-market for new services.

This approach grants strategic independence and assurance. Red Hat injects its vast partner ecosystem and proven certification and validation practices directly into the Sylva framework. Imagine deploying business-critical applications, like 5G core network software, already certified on Red Hat OpenShift, with the confidence that it is automatically validated for a Sylva deployment. Service providers gain the flexibility of an open standard while retaining the confidence of a carrier-grade, supported platform built with production security needs in mind. 

Ultimately, this convergence fuels increased operational agility. By standardizing on a common cloud-native platform, service providers can simplify management and break down operational silos. This frees up teams who can shift focus from the complexities of managing fragmented infrastructure to the high-value work of innovation, developing and deploying the unique, revenue-generating services that will define their future.

Our work with Sylva exemplifies the Red Hat ethos: collaborate on the common foundational layer, so you can innovate on what makes your business unique. By aligning Red Hat OpenShift with Sylva, we are providing our customers with a proven path to modernize their infrastructure, master hybrid cloud strategy, and build a unified cloud capable of running any application, anywhere.