AT&T is in the midst of an ambitious project called Airship that could have sweeping implications for the $350 billion telecom equipment industry.
Late last week, AT&T signed an "8-figure," three-year deal with a company called Mirantis. According to Mirantis, the company will help AT&T build out and manage the infrastructure it needs for its 5G network.
Airship means that if you want to build a cloud, specialized hardware and software from vendors like VMware, Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei are unnecessary, Mirantis' cofounder and chief marketing officer, Boris Renski, tells us.
AT&T's Airship, which is open-source software, will run in the telecom giant's data centers, running the software needed for core 5G functions like routing phone calls or streaming and processing video, Renski says.
And a lot of telco companies are watching to see how it turns out.
"AT&T is the biggest, baddest, oldest telco out there," Renski says. "For this refresh cycle, for the first time in telco history, they are choosing to not buy new [proprietary] boxes but, instead, use tech open sourced by Google to refresh their network for their 5G cycle. This will set the precedent in the industry."
AT&T hopes that precedent extends far beyond telecommunications, Amy Wheelus, the company's vice president of Network Cloud & Infrastructure, told Business Insider in an emailed statement.
There's been "a lot of interest in Airship," she said, adding that it was "not just from telcos." AT&T expects other industries to use Airship for their own giant data-center projects, too, from manufacturers to healthcare companies.
VMware is out
Airship is championed by AT&T, but the company doesn't actually own or maintain it. It is run by the OpenStack Foundation, an industry group that is the keeper of several open-source projects. AT&T is a member of the OpenStack Foundation, as are IBM and Comcast, among others.
Airship was launched last spring, spearheaded by AT&T, Intel, and SK Telecom. But interest has been so high that Wheelus says it's "on track" to "graduate" by next spring, meaning it will be upgraded from its in-development status and deemed ready for companies to use with confidence.
Airship is stitching together several open-source software technologies to make it easier for companies to build, run, and scale giant cloud computing projects at the size of companies like AT&T.
Mirantis, AT&T, and those involved with Airship will be making OpenStack, a data-center operating system, work with another hugely popular, open-source cloud technology called Kubernetes.
Kubernetes, sometimes known as K8S, is a software-container management system. Software containers are a hugely popular technology for cloud apps that ensure the app works well no matter which cloud it lives on — whether it's Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or anybody else's. An increasing number of programmers use Kubernetes to manage all of their containers.
AT&T looked at offerings from VMware for this project and nixed the idea, AT&T's Ryan Van Wyk, a cloud engineer executive, told Mitch Wagner of the telecom news site Light Reading.
"There really isn't much of an alternative," Van Wyk told Light Reading. "Your alternative is VMware. We've done the assessments, and VMware doesn't check boxes we need."
Containers in general, and Kubernetes in particular, are generally considered an alternative to VMware's flagship technology, known as virtualization. In recognition of the shifting tide, VMware in late 2018 bought a startup called Heptio. Heptio was founded by two of the three folks who created Kubernetes during their time at Google. This means VMware also offers its own commercial Kubernetes product.
But because Google has made Kubernetes a free and open-source software project, Airship doesn't need to buy a commercial Kubernetes product or service. It can make Kubernetes work with OpenStack, another open-source project, without paying software license fees to anyone. That removes a major barrier to entry.
There are other losers
Because AT&T is using open-source software as it upgrades its infrastructure to handle 5G, Airship will be able to run on lower-cost, commercially available off-the-shelf hardware, known in industry speak as COTS.
So where AT&T might typically spend big on new hardware to manage this change, it can save a ton by using more readily available, cheaper products. That bodes poorly for the legacy data-center hardware providers.
"Historically these [upgrade] cycles are an opportunity for the likes of Huawei, Cisco, Juniper, etc. to sign big contracts and sell their big preintegrated hardware boxes," Mirantis' Renski says.
And this isn't the only high-profile attempt in the telco industry to move toward less expensive hardware on free, open-source software.
SK Telecom has also been involved in the Telecom Infra Project, originally spearheaded by Facebook, which is also creating open-source telecom software and hardware. AT&T isn't a member of that project, though it is involved in the other Facebook-spawned hardware organization — the Open Compute Project, which is creating open-source hardware for data centers.
And Wheelus tells us that AT&T has embraced open-source projects and has no plans to go back.
Open source, which allows all of the software's users to build what they want and need together, helps AT&T "move away from the proprietary solutions that existed previously from specific vendors," she said. "This allows us to keep costs low and move fast adopting cutting edge capabilities very quickly. Overall AT&T has committed over 10 million lines of code to open source communities — and no signs of slowing down."
Google could be the big winner
So, if the traditional vendors are being put on notice by upstart open-source telecom projects like Airship and Telecom Infra Project, who is rubbing their hands in glee?
The answer: Google, at least when it comes to Airship.
"The biggest winner is Google because they are the fathers of Kubernetes," Renski says.
Google first developed Kubernetes to be used internally on its massive data centers and apps. Google has since released it as open source, making it freely available to anyone. It's since become so popular that all the major clouds have been forced to support it.
But because it was created by Google, Google's cloud is still considered the best for Kubernetes-dependent apps. In fact, Google engineers are still the ones who contribute the most code to Kubernetes, according to tracking site Stackalytics.
To be sure, Google and its cloud are not directly involved in AT&T's 5G project. AT&T's use of Airship will run in AT&T's data centers and not on any cloud.
But as startups and existing vendors race to create 5G apps for telecom providers and users alike, they are likely to host them in the cloud. And because Kubernetes is still a keystone accomplishment for Google, they could be more likely to turn to Google Cloud, over competitors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The telcos are also the big winners, who believe they'll be building the tech they need to make 5G a reality, while reducing costs.
"It has the potential to greatly change the way we think about deploying and managing software in the future," AT&T's Wheelus said.
