Wind River Announces Cloud Platform for 5G vRAN/MEC

"The demand for cloud environments on the edge side is increasing. Companies can create new services by utilizing the ultra-low latency of 5G on the edge instead of the cloud side."2021 At a press conference held on March 3, 2018, Mr. Chisa Nakata, President and CEO of Wind River (Japanese subsidiary), spoke about the background to the development and provision of "Wind River Studio" announced this time.

Wind River (Japan) President Chisa Nakata (left) and Wind River Systems Chief Technology Officer Paul Miller

According to Nakata, Wind River Studio is the company's first "cloud-native platform." It provides various functions for efficiently developing, deploying, operating, and managing services for applications that utilize Kubernetes and container technology for edge computing environments. Wind River has traditionally been strong in OS/virtualization products for embedded products that require real-time performance. Developed based on the open source cloud platform "StarlingX", Wind River Studio is divided into several stages and functions are provided sequentially. Started offering "Wind River Studio Operator Capabilities" to support deployment and operation management. With Verizon, a telecommunications carrier in North America, "We started working on it a few years ago, and last year it was adopted as a vRAN platform in the 5G production environment, and the virtual base station is already in operation," said Nakata.

Overview of Wind River Studio. Release "Operator Capabilities" on the left first

In addition, Wind River Studio Developer Capabilities, a platform for developers, is also available for public preview. It has functions such as DevSecOps toolchain, digital twin, digital feedback loop, device security, OTA, etc., and is scheduled to be officially released in the spring of 2021. Wind River Studio's CTO, Paul Miller, elaborated on Wind River Studio's features and functionality. Wind River Studio is based on the open source project "StarlingX". StarlingX is an open source version of "Titanium Cloud", a solution for NFV (network function virtualization) infrastructure developed by Wind River (reference article: Will StarlingX be the foundation for 5G vRAN? Bringing cloud technology to the network edge) In addition to the aforementioned Verizon, European telecommunications carriers and vendors that develop and manufacture RAN equipment are also developing virtual software base stations that utilize this. Based on this, Wind River Studio also supports RAN software and edge applications from various vendors, as well as various hardware that runs them, making it possible to deploy multi-vendor vRAN/edge clouds.