Accelerate Telco Edge Innovation: SUSE Edge 3.3 Unleashes Scalable Arm Power for 5G

The future of telecommunications is distributed, disaggregated, and increasingly, powered by the edge. As communication service providers (CSPs) accelerate their 5G rollouts, embrace Open RAN, and explore new revenue streams through enterprise edge services, the demand for highly efficient, scalable, and secure edge computing platforms has never been more critical.

We at SUSE are thrilled to announce the general availability of SUSE Edge for Telco 3.3, a pivotal release that significantly strengthens our commitment to the Telco industry. This latest version delivers a wealth of enhancements, with a particular focus on deepening and optimizing our support for Arm processors, marking a strategic leap forward for telco-grade and edge deployments.

The Arm Advantage: Efficiency, Performance, and Scale for the Telco Edge

For years, Arm has been gaining significant traction in data centers and cloud environments for its exceptional power efficiency and performance-per-watt characteristics. At the edge, these attributes become even more pronounced. Telco edge deployments often face stringent constraints on power, cooling, and physical space. Arm-based processors are ideally suited to meet these challenges, offering:

• Superior Energy Efficiency: Lower power consumption directly translates to reduced operational costs (OPEX) and a smaller carbon footprint, crucial for sustainable network expansion.
• Optimized Performance per Watt: Get more compute power for less energy, enabling richer application experiences at the edge without compromising on resource efficiency.
• Diverse Form Factors: The flexibility of the Arm ecosystem allows for a vast array of hardware designs, from compact, ruggedized devices for cell towers to denser deployments for regional edge data centers. This diversity provides CSPs with unprecedented choice in building their distributed infrastructure.
• Reduced TCO: The combined benefits of lower power consumption, optimized cooling requirements, and often more cost-effective hardware, lead to a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO) for telco edge deployments.

What’s New in SUSE Edge 3.3 for Arm-Powered Telco Edge?

SUSE Edge 3.3 builds upon our robust foundation, integrating new capabilities and optimizations specifically for Arm. This release ensures that CSPs can fully leverage the Arm architecture for their most demanding Telco Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs) and enterprise edge applications.

Here are some key highlights related to Arm integration and Telco benefits in SUSE Edge 3.3:

Enhanced Arm Ecosystem Integration

SUSE Edge 3.3 now offers deeper integration and validation with a broader range of Arm-based platforms. This ensures seamless deployment and operation across diverse telco hardware, thanks to extensive testing with leading Arm chip partners, which gives our customers more choice and flexibility.

This improved integration comes from the latest versions of SUSE Linux Micro (SL Micro 6.0 and 6.1) included in SUSE Edge and SUSE Edge for Telco. While SL Micro 6.0 already significantly expanded support for various Arm Systems-on-Chips (SoCs), we’ve further improved Arm integration in the 6.1 release.

To achieve this, we use Kiwi, a powerful tool for building custom operating system images. Think of it as a ready-to-use software appliances (like an OS image with a pre-configured application). Kiwi lets us customize SL Micro by adding specific packages, and patches necessary to enhance Arm integration and solve bugs. Once customized, this OS image is then incorporated into the Edge Image Builder (EIB) workflow to create and deploy your edge clusters efficiently.

The final images created by EIB are ready to integrate in the CAPI (Cluster API) and Metal3 workflow, ready to deploy and manage Arm-based “downstream” clusters directly from your management cluster.

A significant new feature in SUSE Edge 3.3 is the ability to provision Arm downstream clusters from a management cluster running on x86_64 hardware. This is a common setup for telcos because they often have many x86_64 servers in their core data centers that can efficiently manage thousands of edge clusters. Meanwhile, Arm-based servers are often more productive running directly at the edge, not in the core.

Important Note: If you configure your Metal3 setup to deploy Arm clusters, you won’t be able to provision x86_64 based clusters from that same management cluster. This limitation is due to how Metal3 is configured for a specific architecture. On the next release SUSE Edge and SUSe Edge for Telco will be able to deploy and manage Arm and x86_64 downstream clusters altogether.

While it’s technically possible to run an Arm server as your management server and provision Arm downstream clusters, Rancher management clusters running on Arm are currently in tech preview (meaning they’re not yet supported for production environments). Therefore, this capability is also considered a tech preview in SUSE Edge and SUSE Edge for Telco.

For scenarios needing mixed-architecture downstream clusters, you can manage them, but with the current limitation of only being able to manage either Arm or x86_64 clusters using CAPI and Metal3 from a given management cluster. However, Rancher can manage both at the same time.

Simplified Cluster Management with CAPI and GitOps

In this latest release, we’ve significantly improved the integration of Turtles (Rancher’s CAPI extension) with Metal3 and GitOps. This makes managing your clusters “as code” from SUSE Edge easier and simpler than ever.

• Streamlines the ClusterClass experience by adding more examples that are actively validated in tests
• Ships Cluster API Provider RKE2 v0.14.0 with In-place propagation support for RKE2ControlPlane
• Ships Cluster API Provider Add-on Provider Fleet v0.8.1
• Requires Rancher v2.11.0 by Rancher Turtles Helm chart

Furthermore, you can now use ClusterClass to simplify management-as-code and improve team collaboration when using CAPI. ClusterClass, a new feature within CAPI, allows for template-based cluster management. This dramatically reduces the amount of code needed to manage and deploy clusters, making the process much more streamlined. To learn more about ClusterClass and CAPI, check out this blog by Carlos Salas and Alberto Morgante.

Advanced Real-Time Capabilities (for SUSE Edge for Telco)

For the most demanding 5G and industrial use cases, SUSE Edge for Telco (built on the SUSE Edge foundation) leverages an optimized real-time kernel. This now comes with even more robust support for Arm. This ensures highly predictable performance and extremely low latency (ultra-low jitter), which is critical for time-sensitive applications like Precision Timing Protocol -PTP despite being still on tech preview- and synchronized networks.

Continued Alignment with Industry Standards

SUSE’s commitment to open source and industry standards remains unwavering. SUSE Edge for Telco 3.3, with its enhanced Arm support, continues to align with initiatives like Project Sylva, promoting disaggregation (breaking down monolithic systems into smaller, independent parts) and interoperability across the telco cloud ecosystem. Helping with a better alignment and integration with other industry-standard components.

Authors:

Andrés Valero

Alberto Morgante