Development Environment

There are different ways to build a development environment for Aether. Historically, Aether-in-a-Box (AiaB) has provided an easy way to deploy and test Aether. AiaB is still available (as documented in Version 2.1 of this Guide), but it is no long supported.

Aether OnRamp, which builds on AiaB, is now the recommended way to deploy and test Aether. It works across a range of scenarios, from a single VM running an emulated RAN to a multi-node cluster supporting a physical RAN. OnRamp's Quick Start blueprint is the closest in functionality to AiaB.

Note

If you are already using AiaB for your development, it should continue to work for the foreseeable future. One reason to consider migrating to OnRamp is that it establishes a well-defined procedure for contributing new configurations (OnRamp calls them blueprints) back to the community. This includes daily integration tests to ensure that various combinations of features continue to function correctly.

Finally, many developers prefer to work directly with Helm and Kubernetes, bypassing the scripts/playbooks that AiaB and OnRamp provide. This approach is especially efficient when you are working on a single component and not concerned with cross-component integration. The following section on ROC Development adopts this approach. For details about contributing to SD-Core and SD-RAN, we refer you to their respective guides:

• SD-Core Documentation

• SD-RAN Documentation