StarlingX—the open source edge computing and IoT cloud platform optimized for low latency and high performance applications—is available in its first release today. The project was established in May as a pilot project supported by the OpenStack Foundation (OSF) and builds on code contributed by Wind River and Intel Corporation.
StarlingX delivers new services to help fill the gaps in the open source edge cloud ecosystem to meet strict requirements of edge use cases and scenarios in both carrier and industrial applications. Additionally, StarlingX leverages components of projects including Ceph, OpenStack and Kubernetes and complements them with new services such as configuration and fault management with a focus on key requirements like high availability (HA), quality of service (QoS), performance and low latency.
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Use Cases Reflect the Need for High-Performance Edge and IoT Infrastructure
Ultra low-latency 5G and industrial IoT use cases including industrial automation, cloud radio access network and smart city/buildings (metering and monitoring)
Multi-access edge computing applications including augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) and location-based retail
High-bandwidth, large-volume applications including mobile high-definition video, content delivery and caching, and surveillance
Enterprise-focused small cell services for stadiums and high-density locations
Universal customer premise applications (uCPE)
An Engaged, Growing Community
Today’s release reflects strong growth in the StarlingX community, with 1,329 commits from 84 contributors, including developers representing Wind River, Intel, 99Cloud, China UnionPay, SUSE, Fujitsu and NEC, among others. Engage with the StarlingX community on IRC (#starlingx on Freenode) and on the mailing list (lists.starlingx.io).
Key Capabilities
Configuration Management—The code offers node configuration and inventory management services with auto-discovery and configuration of new nodes, critical for deploying and managing large numbers of remote or hard-to-access sites. The Horizon graphical user interface and a command-line interface manage the inventory of CPUs, GPUs, memory, huge pages and crypto/compression hardware.
Fault Management—Users can set, clear and query custom alarms and logs for significant events on both infrastructure nodes and virtual resources such as VMs and networks. Users can access the Active Alarm List and Active Alarm Counts Banner on the Horizon GUI.
Host Management—The software provides lifecycle management functionality to manage host machines via a REST API interface. This vendor-neutral tool detects host failures and initiates automatic recovery by providing monitoring and alarming for cluster connectivity, critical process failures, resource utilization thresholds and hardware faults. The tool also interfaces with the board management controller for out-of-band reset, power-on/off and hardware sensor monitoring and shares host state with other StarlingX components.
Service Management—StarlingX provides lifecycle management of services by providing high availability through redundancy models like N+M or N across multiple nodes. The service supports the use of multiple messaging paths to avoid split-brain communication failures as well as active or passive monitoring to specify the impact of a service failure with a fully data-driven architecture.
Software Management—This service allows users to deploy updates for corrective content and new functionality with a consistent mechanism applicable for all infrastructure stacks from the kernel up to OpenStack services. The module can perform rolling upgrades including parallelization and support for host reboot allowing the moving of workloads off of the node by using live migration.
Meet the StarlingX Community at the Berlin Summit
Members of the StarlingX community will gather at the next OpenStack Open Infrastructure Summit in Berlin, November 13-15, at the following sessions:
StarlingX Project Update: 6 Months in the Life of a New Open Source Project
Project Onboarding Session: for anyone planning to contribute to StarlingX
Ask Me Anything Session: focused on the StarlingX project
Edge Project Comparison Session: Akraino, StarlingX, OpenCord & vCO Modules vs. ETSI MEC RA
StarlingX CI Session: From Zero to Zuul
StarlingX Overview: Enhancements for Edge Networking
Edge Computing Track: presentations and panel discussions about StarlingX and edge-related topics
Forum Working Sessions: edge computing will be prominently featured, including, “Edge use cases and requirements,” “MVP (Minimum Viable Product) architecture for edge,” and “Cross-technical leadership session (OpenStack, Kata, StarlingX, Airship, Zuul)”
About StarlingX
StarlingX is the open source edge computing and IoT cloud platform optimized for low latency and high performance applications. It provides a scalable and highly reliable edge infrastructure, tested and available as a complete stack. Applications include industrial IoT, telecom, video delivery and other ultra-low latency use cases. StarlingX ensures compatibility among diverse open source components and provides unique project components for fault management and service management among others to ensure high availability of user applications. StarlingX is the ready-for-deployment code base for edge implementations in scalable solutions. The project is supported by the OpenStack Foundation. www.starlingx.io
Supporting Quotes
Jonathan Bryce
executive director
the OpenStack Foundation
“When it comes to edge, it is crucial to be able to blend together and manage all the virtual machine and container-based workloads and underlying bare metal environment. This is exactly what you get with StarlingX.”
Junwei Liu
deputy general manager, Cloud Computing Products Division
China Mobile Suzhou R&D Center
“As a high-performance open source edge cloud platform, the StarlingX project has strong system configuration management, high availability management, software management, fault management and other capabilities. These capabilities are currently lacking in open source OpenStack and are also key requirements for enterprise customers. It is believed that the future StarlingX project can be widely used in the fields of edge cloud and telecom cloud. China Mobile Suzhou R&D Center will participate in the StarlingX community in combination with its own products and business needs to create a better future.”
Dr. Dan Chen
senior director of Edge Computing, Intelligent Network Center
China Unicom
“We have run a full validation on StarlingX over the past six months. StarlingX improved efficiency on high-availability in both VMs and at the controller level. It also optimized the required number of nodes to support edge-deployment scenarios. Features were added in fault management, rolling upgrading, inventory discovery and VNF acceleration. StarlingX provided capability in VM-applications/VNFs hosting, and it also can be extended to support containerized applications in the future. It is one of the top strategies of China Unicom to build an ‘open’ edge platform. As an ‘Open Infra’ technology for edge computing, StarlingX will play an essential role in China Unicom’s edge strategy.”
Imad Sousou
corporate vice president, Intel Corp., and
general manager, Intel Open Source Technology Center
“Intel is proud of our contributions to StarlingX and work to build a resilient Cloud infrastructure for edge, industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and telecom applications. Today marks a major milestone with the release of the full StarlingX software package. Congratulations to everyone involved for delivering an open, distributed edge solution that supports high-availability and ultra-low-latency.”
Glenn Seiler
vice president of product management and strategy, Software-defined Infrastructure
Wind River
“Recognizing the vast need for a virtualized edge solution that can span across emerging 5G and IIoT use cases, Wind River contributed key technologies from our Wind River Titanium Cloud virtualization platform to the StarlingX project. With the first release of the StarlingX project, the community now has a complete, deployable platform that can be used in multiple edge use cases. We are looking forward to even greater participation and accelerated progress from the community to continue to drive new innovation and services deployed at the network edge.”