Linux Foundation Europe has announced the formation of Project Sylva. Designed to create a new, open source production-grade Telco Cloud Stack, Project Sylva’s common cloud software framework and adjacent Reference Implementation will reduce fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services. Sylva is the first project hosted by LF Europe, less than two months into its launch.

Five European carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form the Sylva project to address challenges associated with telco and edge use cases within the EU and globally.

Project Sylva will build on top of existing open source projects to provide implementations and extensions. Despite the specific European needs, the Sylva project has broader ambitions, and should be seen as a global player within the Telco Cloud ecosystem, as it’s open to collaborators outside the European Union as well.

Specific goals of Project Sylva include the following: release a cloud software framework to prioritise requirements, develop solutions to be integrated within existing open source components, and produce production-grade solutions to be leveraged within commercial products, and also develop a reference implementation of this cloud software framework and create an integration and validation program to accelerate adoption of network functions within the cloud.