Sylva Accelerates Telco Cloud Innovation with Host Based Routing, v1.4 Release and New Industry Backing

TIM joins as a Premier sponsor, with AMD, Whitestack and Wind River coming on board as General sponsors — marking a new phase of growth and adoption

BRUSSELS -- The Sylva Project, a Linux Foundation Europe initiative accelerating the adoption of an open, production-grade telco cloud stack, today announced a major breakthrough in telco cloud networking: Host Based Routing (HBR), a new model to simplify complex network function (NF) integrations and data center connectivity. Alongside this, the project has released Sylva v1.4, introducing new capabilities in modularity, edge security and lifecycle automation.

Underscoring growing industry support, TIM has joined Sylva as a Premier sponsor, with Wind River, AMD and Whitestack coming on board as General sponsors. 

"We welcome new members and are excited to see the community grow and deliver on the simplicity promise of Telco Cloud," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager & senior vice president, networking, edge IoT at the Linux Foundation. "They join existing members in strengthening Sylva's role as a collaborative force shaping the future of telco cloud infrastructure."

In cloud native environments, managing Kubernetes clusters is highly automated, but the underlying data center networks still require manual, error-prone configuration. This is particularly true for telco environments where network functions often demand intricate, customized connectivity with legacy systems.

To solve this, Sylva introduced HBR, an innovative solution that integrates Kubernetes clusters directly with EVPN/VXLAN network fabrics using containerized routing agents and BGP. This approach enables full network automation from within Kubernetes, without touching the physical network configuration post-deployment.

Originally developed by Deutsche Telekom and built on Free Range Routing (FRR), HBR has been in production since 2022 across over 300 bare metal clusters, powering critical workloads like 5G SA Core. Now, the solution is being extended to the broader Sylva ecosystem through a hands-on proof-of-concept collaboration with Orange and 6WIND.

Sylva is poised to embrace the HBR concept as an advanced cluster connectivity option, which includes full integration with a Host Network Operator, GitOps compatibility and a pluggable architecture for enterprise routing agents. The new release enables declarative, self-service network connectivity for telco workloads.

"Host Based Routing  makes it possible to manage network routing in a fully declarative way," said Guillaume Nevicato, technical steering committee co-chair of the Sylva Project. "Pods in various VLANs can communicate without ever needing to configure switches."

"We are excited to bring Host Based Routing to Sylva," said Vuk Gojnić, cluster networking lead at Sylva. "It will significantly reduce the complexity of telco cloud deployment and enable zero-touch, vendor-independent cluster connectivity automation."

Sylva v1.4: Advancing Modularity, Security and Lifecycle Automation

In parallel, Sylva v1.4 brings major improvements across the edge continuum, 5G Core, and Open RAN, focusing on automation, flexibility, and secure operations.

Key highlights of v1.4 include:

• Improved modularity: Refactored architecture enables smoother integration with new Cluster API providers such as Canonical Kubernetes, OpenNebula, VCD and major hyperscalers.
• 5G readiness: Enhancements to SR-IOV and CNI bonding, plus a new egress gateway based on Calico.
• Security features: New support for node firewalling and NeuVector deployment on workload clusters.
  Operational UX: GUI/API interface Kunai enables business-friendly operations, separating infrastructure from service management.
• Resilience: New tooling and documentation for managing backup and restore of the management cluster.
• Tech previews: GitOps integrations and support for Canonical Kubernetes distributions.
• Immutable OS support: Integration of Leap Micro, running in read-only mode with real-time workload support – ideal for edge deployments.

Open Collaboration with LF Europe

In a significant development for the Sylva community, several new sponsors have joined, bolstering the project's global expertise and ecosystem:

• TIM joins as a Premier Sponsor, reinforcing its leadership role in advancing telco cloud technologies.
• Wind River, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Whitestack have joined as General Sponsors.

Supporting quotes:

"We're thrilled to join the Sylva Project and contribute our expertise to an initiative that puts openness in telco cloud first. By collaborating across the broader telco ecosystem, we can accelerate cloud native innovation and simplify deployments for operators worldwide."

— Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, data center ecosystems and solutions, AMD

"Host Based Routing represents a fundamental shift in infrastructure governance in telco cloud environments. By enabling declarative network management within cloud native technologies, Host Based Routing reduces both operational complexity and vendor lock-in – two critical barriers to telco cloud adoption. This milestone demonstrates how Sylva's collaborative development model under Linux Foundation Europe can deliver production-ready solutions that enable community-driven innovation in network automation. The economic implications are significant: operators can now achieve genuine multi-vendor interoperability without the traditional integration costs that have constrained innovation in this sector."
–  Mirko Boehm, director of community development, Linux Foundation Europe

"TIM is proud to become a Premier sponsor of the Sylva community, thus strengthening the support provided as one of the project's founding members. We are glad to continue to contribute to the delivery of the Sylva open source Cloud Stack."
– Andrea Calvi, head of technology evolution, LAP and devices, TIM

"Whitestack is proud to support Sylva's mission to accelerate telco cloud adoption through open, carrier-grade innovation. We strongly believe in Sylva's mission to standardize the telco cloud infrastructure layer, enabling a consistent and unified deployment model for network functions. By driving alignment across the ecosystem, Sylva is helping the industry overcome fragmentation and move faster toward fully automated, open networks."
— José Miguel Guzmán, CTO, Whitestack

"The Sylva Project represents an important step forward in building an open, production-grade telco cloud ecosystem. As an active contributor to StarlingX, Wind River brings deep experience delivering scalable, secure telco cloud infrastructure in live networks worldwide. Drawing from our real-world experiences and insights, we look forward to collaborating within Sylva to drive greater automation, multi-vendor interoperability and innovation across the industry."

– Paul Miller, CTO, Wind River

About Sylva
Sylva is an open source project under Linux Foundation Europe that delivers a production-grade telco cloud stack while fostering collaboration among operators, vendors, and cloud providers. Sylva aims to transform edge and cloud infrastructure through a secure, standardized, and scalable model.