Centaurus - The Next Generation Cloud Platform for Telecom

With the increasing adoption of cloud technology in recent times, cloud computing has become the norm to develop, store, deploy, and run current and future applications, networks, infrastructures, databases, servers, and many more with respect to AI and 5G network, and Open Edge Architecture. To manage these resources, the cloud infrastructure platform needs a solution to compute and perform network related operations across data centers.   

Let us take a deep dive into how the next generation cloud helps telecom industries to address the gaps and prepare for the public and private clouds from the ground up. 

There are situations when one needs to containerize their environment, manage infrastructure, latency, multiple nodes, edge computing, edge core, edge network, etc. 

Centaurus , a next-generation cloud for the telecom sector, is an open-source project for building cloud infrastructure platform that can be used to build and manage public or private clouds, edge computing, and edge device datacenter. It is a solution to address key challenges of large-scale clouds such as system scalability, resource efficiency, multi-tenancy, edge computing, and the native support for the fast-growing modern workloads such as containers and serverless functions. Centaurus helps in creating multiple nodes, managing infrastructure, containerizing the environment, managing the pods, and many more.  

Centaurus for telecom sectors helps with edge computing that brings the technology resources near to end users so as to accelerate the data at regular basis without any interruption. It solves problems like latency, bandwidth limitations, high cost of data transit, and privacy of data. 

For telecom industries, Centaurus is one of the top-most helpful projects that help in infrastructure management, network connectivity, computing with AI and 5g technology. 

Fig: Architecture of Centaurus

Centaurus with its capability of combining traditional IaaS and PaaS layers in one infrastructure platform helps in cost and cloud management, disaster recovery, security, and multi-tenancy. It offers the same API experience to provision and manage virtual machines, containers, serverless and other types of cloud resources.   

Centaurus is divided into two sub-projects as follows:

1. Arktos (for Compute) – an extension of Kubernetes
2. Mizar (for Network) – developed by the Huawei team from the scratch

1. Arktos (Compute)

Arktos brings technology resources like compute and storage closer to the end user, to the place where the data is generated in real time in a quick feedback loop. This data can be synchronized with cloud at a regular pace. Arktos solves various cloud related challenges like latency, bandwidth limitations, high cost of data transit and data privacy requirements.
It is an open-source solution for challenges of large-scale clouds. It proves to be beneficial in terms of speed and latency, security, cost saving, greater reliability, and scalability.   

2.Mizar (Network)

The second project by Centaurus is Mizar, often called as Network is an open-source, simple, and efficient solution that helps users to create a multi-tenant overlay network for a massive number of endpoints with extensible network functions. Mizar accelerates the network resource provisioning for dynamic cloud environments with high network throughput and low latency. It helps in isolating multi-tenant’s traffic and address space. It brings together the network data-plane for containers, serverless functions, virtual machines, and infrastructure.   

Click2Cloud's Contribution:

Click2Cloud^®, an active contributor in the Open-source community, plans to provide a framework for setting and managing a Cloud Native Infra through Centaurus project. The project extends to define a Distributed cloud for hyperscale datacenter and resource constrained Edge sites.
We plan to support a large-scale regional deployment, the regional sites interacting with multitude of devices using standard open-source plugins which would align with the needs of the Telecom industry. Click2Cloud will thus provide Workload orchestration of regional installations, Manage VMs, containers and applications running on Edge sites using its Open5G platform based on Centaurus architecture.  

Centaurus is a huge package of multiple advantages for next generation telecom sectors such as:

Fig: Centaurus Benefits

• Multi-tenant Cloud Platform
• Hyper-Scale Unified Cloud Network
• High-Performance Data Plane
• Cloud-Native Networking Management Plane
• High performance cloud network
• Unified container / VM orchestration
• Global scheduling

Summary!

The above article summarizes Centaurus with its impeccable solutions for the next generation cloud telecom. It provides the extended version for the distributed cloud. With integrated orchestration, multi-tenant, high performance, and cloud-native networking it provides the updated solution compared to other cloud resources. Centaurus helps in deployment and management of complete lifecycle of software-defined networking solutions. With unified orchestration, it natively manages virtual machines, bare-metal compute nodes, and containers.