SUSE powers commercial Sylva implementation with scalable zero-touch automation

April 8, 2025 | By: Rajesh Rajamani

Sylva-based Telco stack successfully deployed globally

Project Sylva was launched in 2022 by leading Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) in Europe. As a Linux Foundation Europe initiative, the project aims to address industry fragmentation and integration challenges by developing a homogenous cloud framework specifically for telco and edge use cases. The project also created a reference implementation for the framework and a validation program for these implementations.

Two years later, at MWC 2025, the French telecommunications provider Orange announced that it was launching 5G and other IT offerings across multiple countries, utilizing a common reference Project Sylva architecture, with commercial support from SUSE. Following Orange’s lead, other European and North American CSPs are expected to deploy Sylva-based telco platforms for 5G and edge workloads by the end of 2025.

The shift towards Sylva-compliant, horizontally integrated telecom platforms and away from proprietary, vertically integrated platforms by CSPs is driven by three key factors:

Drive innovation: Open, cloud native platforms enable CSPs to accelerate innovation, create new revenue streams and leverage their deployment footprint to securely deliver innovative services to new customer segments.
Increase efficiency: Project Sylva’s unified cloud architecture, applicable to any use case across bare metal, private and public cloud, increases efficiency through unified tooling, processes and skill sets, and allows CSPs to access a larger talent pool by aligning with industry standards.
Embrace open source: The project prevents vendor lock-ins, allowing CSPs to optimize spending and adopt a best-of-breed approach by combining components and solutions from a broad ecosystem of interoperable, vendor-neutral components.

Project Sylva’s benefits extend beyond CSPs to other stakeholders in the ecosystem. The open, homogenous platform enables a “build once, deploy many times” model for NEPs and ISVs. Additionally, edge platform providers and system integrators can create distributions from Project Sylva, offer support for deployments, and provide validation services.

SUSE stack designed to address Telco and Edge challenges

SUSE has actively participated in Project Sylva since its early stages, showcasing its commitment to the initiative. The company has taken a significant step by developing the SUSE Edge for Telco platform, aligning it closely with the Sylva architecture. As illustrated in Figure 1, the SUSE platform functions as the open source CaaS (Container as a Service) layer, as defined by Project Sylva.

This strategic alignment positions the SUSE platform as a versatile and shared foundation for CSPs, NEMs, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and system integrators. They can leverage this common substrate to create and deploy innovative, cloud native solutions tailored for the telecommunications and industrial edge sectors. This approach not only fosters collaboration but also accelerates the development and deployment of advanced edge computing solutions within the telecommunications industry.

Figure 1: Cloud layer convergence with SUSE in Sylva architecture

SUSE enhances the Sylva reference architecture by adding features that address the most demanding Telco and Edge use cases. These include:

The ability to centrally manage thousands of Edge/Telco sites, with zero-touch provisioning and automated lifecycle management.
A Telco platform designed to support the specific networking performance and security requirements of Telco use cases.

The following section provides a detailed architecture of the Open CaaS Layer (the SUSE Edge for Telco platform) and explores how it addresses the challenges CSPs face when managing large-scale, distributed Telco environments.

Figure 2: SUSE Telco Solution Architecture

SUSE stack addresses the management at scale challenge for Telco environments

Telco environments today rarely manage just a small number of cell sites or edge locations. Most CSPs plan to deploy hundreds of edge locations, centrally managed from either the CSP data center or the public cloud. This challenge is amplified by the convergence of Telco and industry edge clouds, potentially requiring CSPs to manage thousands of edge locations.

Project Sylva has established a reference architecture for unified Telco/Industry Edge clouds; however, it doesn’t offer specific solutions for the extreme scale and performance demands of Telco networks. Instead, it leaves room for platform vendors and SIs to develop innovative solutions. SUSE has built an open, disaggregated edge computing platform that not only supports the data performance and timing requirements of CSPs but also enables them to manage thousands of edge locations, with zero touch operations and declarative provisioning.

At MWC in March 2025, SUSE showcased a real-world Telco “management at scale” use case, with the network topology detailed in the diagram below.

Telco edge deployment at scale, with SUSE

Figure 3: Telco Edge topology showcasing large scale CSP deployment

The Telco Edge topology described above represents a real-world deployment by a European CSP. This deployment involved a large number of Telco Edge/RAN sites distributed across two countries. Each Telco Edge site is represented by a Kubernetes cluster, with 220 clusters provisioned and managed from a centralized management cloud. The management cloud itself comprises a management Kubernetes cluster. CSPs typically deploy CNFs, AI workloads, or other industry edge workloads on these edge sites. Such deployments traditionally take months to complete successfully, are highly manual, and likely involve many truck rolls.

SUSE designed its Telco stack to address the complexities associated with the lifecycle management of highly distributed Telco infrastructure and applications. The SUSE Telco platform simplifies large-scale Edge/RAN site deployments for CSPs, offering the following capabilities:

An open and robust Kubernetes management cluster, hosted in the public cloud or data center, capable of managing the lifecycle of thousands of workload clusters that can be provisioned in remote locations.
Simplified lifecycle management with an API-driven declarative and programmatic approach.
1. GitOps support to help Telco operators manage Kubernetes clusters at scale using the “define once, deploy often” philosophy. The GitOps engine protects clusters from config drift and non-compliance.
2. Cluster deployment support using Cluster API, helping automate cluster lifecycle. Implements all the necessary CAPI providers and supports the ClusterClass feature, which simplifies the creation and management of multiple Kubernetes clusters using templates.

This “Easy Button” solution helps CSPs deploy Edge/RAN sites at scale and addresses the traditional challenges of lengthy, manual deployments.

Day 0 provisioning at scale

Figure 4: Day 0 provisioning use case for distributed edge deployments

Figure 4 illustrates the open source components of the SUSE MWC demo and how they interact. Fleet recognizes configuration changes in Git and starts the process of creating bare metal host objects and cluster instances, and ultimately completes provisioning. For the Germany region, 200 emulated cluster instances are created using a Bare Metal Controller emulator (Sushy Emulator) and K8S API emulator. The Sushy emulator and the K8S API emulator streamline the creation of the 200 emulated clusters and their associated bare metal hosts for the demo while still realistically interacting with the SUSE Management cluster, exposing it to all the control plane messaging as it would experience in a real-world scenario. The provisioning sequence is further detailed in a flow diagram below.

Figure 5: Provisioning sequence for SUSE automation flow

The SUSE Telco demo, described above, showcases SUSE’s alignment with the Project Sylva reference architecture and highlights additional capabilities. These include a scalable management cluster, a robust Cluster API implementation, and support for ClusterClass, which are essential for reliably deploying and managing large-scale, real-world telco scenarios.

In conclusion, the SUSE Edge for Telco stack offers a solution to the management and scalability challenges that CSPs face with large-scale Edge/RAN site deployments. By offering features such as zero-touch provisioning, automated lifecycle management, and simplified, declarative management, the SUSE Telco stack helps CSPs to deploy and manage thousands of edge locations.