Benjamin Ryzman
on 5 September 2025
The telecommunications industry is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. The move from vertically integrated, proprietary systems to disaggregated, cloud-native infrastructure has unlocked enormous potential for agility and innovation. Yet, for many operators, the challenge has been how to realize that potential while meeting the stringent performance, security, and interoperability requirements that telecom networks demand.
In Europe, this challenge is being addressed head-on by the Sylva project, an open source initiative driven by the continent’s largest telecom operators and network equipment vendors, including Nokia and Ericsson. Canonical joined the Sylva project in 2023. Sylva’s mission is to create a telco-friendly, cloud-native infrastructure stack that not only meets the technical requirements of next-generation telecom workloads, but also aligns with Europe’s priorities for technology sovereignty, security, and regulatory compliance.
We have been working on supporting Sylva by integrating Canonical Kubernetes into the Sylva reference architecture. At the end of the first quarter of 2025, we introduced a Cluster API bootstrap provider for Canonical Kubernetes, and integrated it as a technology preview in Sylva 1.4. The next release, Sylva 1.5, will be the first Sylva version to support Kubernetes 1.32 including Canonical Kubernetes 1.32 LTS, launched in February 2025, with full commercial support. This represents a significant alignment between Sylva’s telco-driven framework and Canonical’s long-term supported Kubernetes distribution.
Why Sylva exists: addressing telco fragmentation
The Sylva whitepaper describes a reality that many in the industry know all too well: fragmentation at the cloud layer. Operators often deploy proprietary container as a service (CaaS) platforms, tailored for specific network functions, which leads to multiple “islands” of infrastructure. This creates complexity for both operators and network function vendors. Operators must manage and skill teams for different stacks, while vendors must certify their software against multiple platforms.
The result is higher costs, slower rollouts, and difficulty in achieving the agility that cloud-native technologies promise.
Sylva’s approach is to converge the cloud layer around open source, interoperable, and production-grade components, with Kubernetes at the core. The project’s Integration and Validation programme ensures that network functions tested against the Sylva framework will run across any compliant implementation, enabling a true “write once, deploy anywhere” model for telecom workloads.
Canonical Kubernetes: a natural fit for Sylva’s mission
Canonical Kubernetes already delivers on many of the core requirements that Sylva has defined. It supports multi-cluster deployments on bare metal, enabling automation across hundreds or even thousands of distributed edge sites. Canonical Kubernetes aligns with GitOps principles and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows, allowing operators to manage fleets of clusters declaratively. It also provides deep support for performance-optimized networking and enhanced platform awareness (EPA), including DPDK, SR-IOV, GPU acceleration, and PTP synchronisation, all essential for 5G RAN, O-RAN, and other latency-sensitive workloads.
Discover how to unlock the full potential of Kubernetes for telco performance
Perhaps most significantly, Canonical offers 12 years of long-term support (LTS) for Kubernetes. This is unprecedented in the Kubernetes ecosystem, where typical support timelines are measured in months. For operators managing critical infrastructure, the ability to standardize on a Kubernetes release for more than a decade is invaluable. They receive guaranteed security updates and fixes throughout this period. This long-term stability reduces operational risk, and helps ensure compliance with evolving standards and regulations.
Validated for telco workloads
Sylva’s Validation Workgroup plays a central role in ensuring that infrastructure components can support the wide range of workloads telcos require. Canonical is working directly with this workgroup to validate Canonical Kubernetes for all major telecom network functions, from the 5G core to RAN to far-edge services.
This validation covers not only compatibility but also performance benchmarks, security hardening, and resource efficiency. In doing so, it ensures that when an operator deploys a network function on Canonical Kubernetes within a Sylva-compliant environment, they can have confidence it will perform to specification, whether in a central data centre or at a remote edge site serving a rural community.
A step toward a fully integrated open source telco cloud
The Canonica Cluster API bootstrap provider introduces Canonical Kubernetes as a core component of the Sylva stack. Together with Canonical OpenStack, MAAS, and other infrastructure technologies, this creates the foundation for a unified, open source telco cloud.
Such an environment can host both virtualised network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) on the same automated platform. Operators are able to manage workloads consistently across private data centres, central offices, and distributed edge sites, simplifying operations and reducing the cost of integrating diverse technologies.
European technology sovereignty and sustainability
Beyond technical alignment, Canonical’s involvement in Sylva speaks to a shared commitment to Europe’s strategic objectives. By basing the infrastructure on open source technology and open APIs, Sylva avoids the lock-in risks associated with hyperscale public cloud providers. It also gives operators and governments full visibility into and control over their network infrastructure – a crucial factor for security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
Sylva also places a strong emphasis on energy efficiency, an area where Canonical’s automation and optimization capabilities can make a tangible impact. By reducing unnecessary compute resource usage and optimizing workloads across distributed edge sites, operators can cut both operational costs and carbon footprint.
Sylva 1.5 and Canonical Kubernetes 1.32 LTS
As Sylva 1.5 is the first release to support Kubernetes 1.32, it unlocks the use of Canonical’s latest long-term supported Kubernetes version, announced in early 2025. Now operators can deploy Canonical Kubernetes 1.32 LTS directly within a Sylva-compliant environment. This combination provides operators with a validated, production-grade platform that brings together Sylva’s telco requirements, Canonical’s automation and lifecycle management, and a 12-year security and maintenance guarantee.
As more network functions are validated on Canonical Kubernetes within the Sylva framework, operators will have a growing catalog of ready-to-deploy workloads, from mobile core to edge AI applications, all interoperable by design.
Conclusion: building the future of telco clouds, together
Sylva represents a new model for how the telecom industry can build its next-generation infrastructure: collaboratively, openly, and with a focus on interoperability and long-term sustainability. Canonical’s contribution of Kubernetes, and its commitment to long-term support, validation, and integration, strengthens this model and accelerates its adoption.
The journey is just beginning. As Sylva evolves, so too will Canonical’s involvement, with potential to integrate more of its infrastructure portfolio and to work closely with operators and vendors in shaping the platform’s future. Together, we can deliver a telco cloud that is not only technically advanced, but also open, secure, and built to last.
