MTS Russia Taps OpenStack and Canonical for Cloud Infrastructure

MTS, Russia’s largest mobile operator and a leading provider of media and digital services, has selected Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack to power the company’s next-generation cloud infrastructure.

MTS plans to leverage Charmed OpenStack’s advanced lifecycle management capabilities and flexible cloud-native architecture to better enable multi-vendor and cross-platform integration.

Serving over 77 million subscribers in Russia, MTS has chosen to partner with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, to further its efforts in building out a full-fledged digital ecosystem based on an open source platform. The partnership is aimed at decreasing time-to-market and speeding up deployment of new services — including toward MTS’ expected future 5G deployment — as well as reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud infrastructure. MTS also anticipates to enhance its core technology expertise and set up a competence center for developing OpenStack-based solutions.

MTS plans to begin operationally rolling out the project next year, ultimately deploying Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack solution across 11 data centers in Russia.

MTS CTO, Victor Belov, commented: “The selection of OpenStack is another step forward in our strategy to migrate towards open source software. Building an ecosystem based on OpenStack will speed up our technology adoption, lay a foundation for future 5G rollout, and enhance our network’s edge compute capabilities. This solution will also enable us to improve virtualization cost effectiveness, as well as expand our ability to leverage a wide variety of virtual platforms. That will not only help us maintain a technical edge in the Russian telecom industry, but also enhance our IT agility and enable us to tackle complex challenges to better meet the needs of our customers.”

“Canonical is truly excited to partner with MTS and provide a platform on which they can roll out their 5G network,” said Regis Paquette, VP Global Alliances at Canonical. “The partnership will help build an underlying network and IT infrastructure bringing the latest updates in a predictable and automated fashion. With comprehensive security built-in, and unified automation from core to remote edge locations, this partnership places MTS at the forefront of innovation with open source.”

“All around the world, carriers love OpenStack. What started as an agile framework to deploy and manage network functions has grown to become a preferred platform for managing the evolution of networks from LTE to 5G,” said Mark Collier, COO, Open Infrastructure Foundation. ”Canonical has been an important vendor since the earliest days, and we congratulate their team on working with MTS to deliver agile, open infrastructure for the company’s 77 million subscribers.”

Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack is based on established technologies such as Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS), Juju Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM), OpenStack Charms and Ceph. Designed to provide the best price-performance for organisations, Charmed OpenStack provides a carrier-grade private cloud implementation that has a number of benefits compared to legacy IT platforms, such as enhanced traffic handling for telecom applications, as well as advanced virtual network and edge compute capabilities. In addition, the platform improves infrastructure resilience and robustness with extensive lifecycle management capabilities, translating to increased data center uptime and availability. The system can also be customized with fit-for-purpose capabilities tailored to real-world scenarios, dynamically adapting and scaling resources on an as-needed basis.