The OpenStack Foundation has released a new open source edge platform. The so-called StarlingX unites existing open source applications such as Kubernetes with Wind River and Intel’s Titanium Cloud code.
Last May, shortly after Intel announced the sale of Wind River to the investment company TPG, both companies already announced that they would contribute their own code of Titanium Cloud to the OpenStack Foundation. According to Wind River, a platform that provides computing, storage and networking solutions for a wide range of peripheral applications, this was largely at the behest of potential customers who would be interested.
Edge cloud software stack
StarlingX is a complete edge cloud software stack. It fully includes the Linux operating system, a hypervisor, a Kubernet-based container platform, and a storage platform, including computer, storage, and networking capabilities based on existing open source components: OpenStack, Ceph, Linux, and so on. We also added StarlingX services for configuration management, error management, software management, host management and the like, said Glenn Seiler, vice president of marketing and product management at Wind River in a comment to Data Center Knowledge.
According to Steiler, it is possible to manage everything in a central data centre. In his opinion it is not practical to have managers, operators and maintenance people at all locations.
Open source required
According to Seiler, many companies have shown interest. From healthcare, retail and government institutions, which did have one clear requirement: that they wanted open source. They wanted to reduce the lock-in of suppliers. They wanted to ensure that if they made a technology or product decision, that decision would have a long life in the industry.
He also announces that he is working on new technologies within StarlingX in order to develop the concept of a distributed edge cloud, where multiple regional locations or mini-datacenters are possible. They can then work with hundreds, if not thousands, of remote servers or devices in a factory or other locations.
Since the platform was acquired by the OpenStack Foundation, both Intel and Wind River have remained involved in the project and the StarlingX code remains the basis for Titanium Cloud. The foundation has also received input from developers representing 99Cloud, China UnionPay, SUSE, Fujitsu, NEC and others.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.