Tele2 Adopts Canonical’s Ubuntu Open Source OpenStack Cloud for NFV

Canonical scored another major telecom partnership related to its open source Ubuntu Linux platform this week, when Tele2 announced that it is moving more operations to the cloud using Canonical’s Ubuntu-based OpenStack platform.

Tele2 is a major European telecommunications provider. On Wednesday, it announced that it is migrating more of its infrastructure to the cloud by adopting OpenStack and network functions virtualization (NFV).

The company is partnering with Canonical to do that by leveraging BootStack, Canonical’s managed, Ubuntu-based OpenStack private cloud offering. Tele2 says it chose Canonical and Ubuntu because it wants to keep its services open.

“Tele2 is embracing open source as a way to speed service deployment and keep costs low,” the company said in a statement. “Tele2 has therefore chosen OpenStack as the foundation for our private cloud. Canonical will provide and manage OpenStack for Tele2 and Canonical’s generic VNF manager, Juju, will be used for the onboarding of new services.”

Huawei and Cisco will also be collaborating with Tele2 on the migration. They will provide hardware and networking services, respectively.

The announcement is a win for Canonical, which has been working hard to make inroads in the telecommunications sector. Tele2’s endorsement of the Ubuntu-based OpenStack offering follows a similar move earlier this year by AT&T, which is also collaborating with Canonical on migrating telecommunications infrastructure to the cloud.

In addition, Tele2’s decision reflects the growing interest among telecoms in the open source cloud and other open source software-defined environments. Projects like the Linux Foundation‘s OPEN-O are in the midst of developing open source SDN and NFV solutions tailored for the telecom industry. But while that code matures, telecoms are already embracing other open source alternatives to traditional infrastructure like BootStack.