AT&T is leveraging Kubernetes automation, open source containers and the Openstack-Helm to bolster the functionality of its OpenStack-powered AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC) platform.
Ryan van Wyk - Assistant Vice President – Cloud Platform Development, wrote in a blog post, "Our team is always looking to improve the AIC by collaboration with the OpenStack Community. One way we are doing this is by creating an enhanced cloud platform that simplifies and accelerates, adding new capabilities to our AIC and other network-based clouds in the industry."
He added that the new platform, called the AIC Container Platform (AIC-CP), will address 5 challenges of large scale OpenStack clouds, like:
- Accelerate the speed of software deployments. It will deliver new cloud sites in days versus weeks, and perform platform upgrades in minutes.
- Enabling predictable cloud platform software through all stages of deployments.
- Increase the frequency with which we can deliver upgrades or cloud infrastructure changes by using the same Continuous Integration /Continuous Delivery process for all types of deployments.
- Minimize the impact on existing network workloads as we’re rolling out new upgrades and services.
- Provide operational maturity with greater visibility into the health of every component, robust software resiliency and the ability for the cloud to heal itself automatically.
The AIC-Container Platform (AIC-CP) is being developed in collaboration with OpenStack and other open source communities. It has 3 core components;
- Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
- Containers, a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of software component, that includes everything needed to run it.
- OpenStack-Helm, an OpenStack project to enable deployment, maintenance, and upgrading of loosely coupled OpenStack services and their dependencies alone or as part of complex environments.
The core component of the AIC-CP is the community project OpenStack-Helm. OpenStack-Helm is Kubernetes, Helm, and OpenStack all working together. It seeks to create templates, or what we call Helm-Charts for each OpenStack service. These Helm-Charts are a mechanism for describing how to instantiate the cloud resources using Kubernetes. They also instruct Kubernetes how to manage the complete life cycle of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure.
