StarlingX 7.0 Delivers Enhanced Scalability, Security, Flexibility as Commercial Adoptions of Edge Cloud Platform Soar

StarlingX—the open source edge computing and IoT cloud platform optimized for low-latency and high-performance applications—is available in its 7.0 release. StarlingX combines Ceph, OpenStack, Kubernetes and more to create a full-featured cloud software stack that provides everything telecom carriers and enterprises need to deploy an edge cloud on a few servers or hundreds of them. StarlingX is used by the most demanding applications in industrial IOT, telecom, video delivery and other ultra-low latency use cases.

Senior Manager, Community & Ecosystem, for the Open Infrastructure Foundation. “Operators, such as Verizon, Vodafone, Elisa, KDDI, NTT Docomo, and more, are relying on the platform to securely provide high bandwidth, low latency connections on distributed devices at all times. While these characteristics are crucial for virtual and Open RAN deployments, they also make StarlingX the ideal platform for innovations like autonomous vehicles, smart cities, augmented reality, manufacturing, drone delivery, and remote healthcare to become reality. Open source StarlingX is a proven solution for edge applications with commercial deployments around the globe. The StarlingX community is working diligently to expand the capabilities of the platform with each release, and StarlingX 7.0 is a prime example; it features enhancements that improve scalability, enhance security and stability, and provide further flexibility for users.”

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Key Features of StarlingX 7.0

To further support the low-latency and distributed cloud requirements of edge computing and industrial IoT use cases, the community prioritized these enhancements in StarlingX 7.0:

Improved scalability

• To support a wider variety of edge use cases, StarlingX 7.0 increases the number of subclouds that the Distributed Cloud architecture can manage. Since the size of edge infrastructures can grow quite large, the community is continuously working on increasing the number of subclouds that the platform can support. For instance, the 7.0 version of the platform can handle up to 1000 All-in-One Simplex (AOI-SX) subclouds.
• StarlingX 7.0 integrates Istio service mesh to enhance Kubernetes in areas such as observability, traffic management, security and policy management.

Enhanced security and stability

• StarlingX 7.0 includes support for security audit logging to capture commands that were executed using the REST API of the platform services, including using SNMP. The functionality is also available for the Kubernetes component of StarlingX with the option to configure at bootstrap time. This feature helps with identifying any suspicious activity and applying preventive measures.
• The community took the first steps to replace Pod Security Policies (PSP) with Pod Security Admission Controller for Kubernetes. With this change, the platform has a more efficient and reliable solution to enforce pod security standards.

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Greater flexibility to manage a diverse set of decentralized workloads

• Upgraded PTP Dual NIC Support Boundary Clock Configuration: The community upgraded base PTP packages in the 7.0 release. This provides much more fine grained configuration options for this feature with which users can now set host-level preferences. This improvement highly increases the manageability of the platform in an area that is crucial for real-time applications in industry segments such as telecommunications, manufacturing and more.
• Enhanced PTP features to support 5G Time SyncE Solution: For many 5G applications, clock synchronization is essential for correct operation. This feature extends the PTP features of StarlingX to support the configuration of NICs which provide Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) support. It also enables users to create a new PTP instance type called ‘clock.’
• Enhancements to Subcloud Local Installation feature: This feature was added in an earlier release to provide further flexibility to deploy the end-to-end edge infrastructure and remove dependencies such as network connection and available bandwidth. The 7.0 release increases the efficiency and stability of the feature.

Other Enhancements

• Debian OS Migration: In StarlingX 7.0, the base operating system has been shifted from CentOS to Debian Stable Release. Debian is a widely known and well-tested open source Linux distribution with long-term maintenance.
• Distributed Cloud Horizon Orchestration Updates: In this version, the Horizon web interface allows users to upgrade components throughout the Distributed Cloud architecture such as Kubernetes, device/firmware image and more.
• This version of the platform also updates Kubernetes to the 1.23.1 version and uses that as default.

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