This project has combined Wind River Studio Cloud Platform as the production-grade distributed Kubernetes solution for managing cloud infrastructure, with the User Plane Function (UPF) application from Elisa’s current 5G core vendor, and the advanced capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, a platform that manages and automates applications deployment in large-scale distributed environments.
The deployment of this edge data centre site represents a significant achievement and is seen as strengthening Elisa’s position as a leading digital service provider in automating operations. It showcases next-generation technologies that unlock the potential of edge computing for a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing.
“As a leader in the 5G landscape that powers the majority of 5G vRAN/O-RAN deployments with global operators, our Wind River Studio capabilities address service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low latency cloud-native infrastructure,” said Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer, Wind River. “Elisa is an innovator, and with their recent milestone, they are helping to advance the industry.”
Wind River Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. Elisa's 5G core UPF application enhances network performance, ensuring efficient and reliable data transmission and processing at the edge. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, the deployment process becomes fully automated, enabling rapid and efficient provisioning of edge data centre resources.
The major outcomes can be grouped in three areas: time to prepare, time to deploy and quality of the process:
Time to prepare: The biggest savings came from parameter settings followed by environment preparation work. The team was able to execute hundreds of tests and scripts before going into live network in the same amount of time that it would typically take to manually run much fewer tests in the traditional model.
Time to deploy: The overall Operator time, measured in terms of staff hours, for commissioning the edge DC site from preparation, parameter settings to complete installation and testing is reduced by 90% as compared to doing the very same tasks manually. Furthermore, the overall deployment time is reduced by around 50% thanks to the automation of the processes.
Quality of the process: Finally, automation brings in additional benefits where multiple tasks can now be run in parallel with minimal probability of human errors, reducing time to service and enhancing network quality.
The successful implementation of this project will help to pave the way for future advancements in edge computing by Elisa and is seen as setting a precedent for the seamless integration of Studio Cloud Platform, critical applications, and automation technologies, empowering industries to accelerate digital transformation and unlock new possibilities.
