Lakelse Release Highlights

• Hybrid Multi-cloud actor and interaction model has been significantly evolved
• Storage section has been further developed improving consumption and production models
• Security alignment with industry standards, in collaboration with GMSMA FASG and LFN Security Forum
• Alignment of Acceleration Abstraction model with ORAN 
• Reference Model Kali release contents was published as GSMA NG Permanent Reference Document NG.126 ver 2.0

The telco cloud is evolving towards a hybrid multi-cloud deployment model. The RM Lakelse defines a generic abstract powerful model that is of value to the Reference Architectures and other standard bodies engaged in this endavor. The current model and related reference architectures provide and will continue to provide  advanced guidelines for multi-cloud deployments in the industry. The growing interest in security, especially related to 5G and automation, was reflected in the Lakelse release.  The infrastructure security guidelines in RM have been referenced by GSMA 5G documents making RM work widely accessible for the telecommunication industry participants.

• The latest release of RA1 specifications conforms to the OpenStack Wallaby release.
• This has allowed the introduction of Cyborg, the general-purpose acceleration resources ((i.e., various types of accelerators such as GPU, FPGA, ASIC, NP, SoCs, etc.) management framework, as an optional service.
• Submitted RA-1 KAli release specifications were submitted for publication as a GSMA Permanent Reference Document.

RA1 now supports a more recent OpenStack release in addition to the widely used Train release version.  The increasing use of accelerators (software and hardware-based), required for 5G, IoT, and ML among others, requires support for their management. Cyborg provides an abstraction for the specific devices (a la the Acceleration Abstraction Layer in O-RAN) and, thus, allows for their generic management.

Publishing of the RA-1 by GSMA makes it more widely available as an industry standard.

• The specifications were updated to the latest release of Kubernetes, 1.22
• Many improvements on critical telco areas like Multitenancy, CNF and cluster Lifecycle management
• Alignment with RM on security and other topics
• Linked specifications with RC2/ Kuberef tests in order to track what requirements drive conformance testing of Kubenetes clusters.

As Kubernetes releases have a fast pace, users can refer to RA2 specifications to increase their conformance to an ever evolving platform.

The new chapters and specifications on security and multitenancy are completing core parts of the Cloud Native Telco Cloud architecture.

Linking to Conformance testing helps final users benchmark implementations of the platform and ensure consistency with the Architecture.