August 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: HPE

By Maemalynn MeanorAkraino, Akraino Edge Stack, Blog, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is represents a diverse set of member companies and people that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Rohit Arora, Enterprise Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to discuss the importance of open source, leading Multi Access Edge Computing (MEC) initiatives, participating in the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and collaborating with the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

HPE is a global, edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company. HPE solutions connect, protect, analyze, and act on data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so insights can be turned into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

We at HPE believe in innovation and open source encourages innovation by bringing communities together to build common platform. HPE has been involved in various open source projects.

Why did you join LF Edge and what sort of impact do you think LF Edge has on the edge, networking, and IoT industries?

We joined LF edge because it aligns with HPE’s direction of edge to cloud. Edge computing is creating a major transformation in most industries and we believe initiatives driven by LF edge are critical for this digital transformation

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the LF Edge community?

There are many benefits of being part of LF edge but we believe the biggest is to be part of a community which is driving the innovation for the next gen networks at the edge.

What sort of contributions has your team made to the community, ecosystem through LF Edge participation?

HPE has contributions on the LF Edge Governing Board and TAC, HPE has also made some contributions to the infrastructure requirements for LF Edge. HPE is also actively involved in LF edge projects such as Akraino and process adoption.

What do you think sets LF Edge apart from other industry alliances?

There are two main reasons LF Edge is different from other industry alliances

A wide set of different community members: There is a wide variety of community members in LF edge from telco services providers, NEPs to chip manufacturers. This provides different viewpoints and provides the right level of expertise that is needed.
Projects execution: The community really believes in executing and we have seen some projects coming from idea to development and then testing at a very fast pace.

How will LF Edge help your business?

HPE is leading infrastructure provider and have wide variety of solutions for the edge. We are also leading MEC (Multi Access Edge Computing) initiatives with some major telcos. By being part of LFEdge we get access to latest innovations and resources in edge computing. This can help us build our solution to fit industry needs.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining LF Edge?

There are so many projects LF Edge is driving, the best place to start would be to pick a project which aligns with your company’s directions and see how you can drive innovation with your contributions for the project. There are many resources available and all the community members are very helpful to provide any info you need.

To find out more about LF Edge members or how to join, click here.

Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the LF Edge Slack to share your thoughts and engage with community members.

August 27, 2020

Finalists for the 2020 Edge Woman of the Year Award!

By LF EdgeBlog, State of the Edge

Written by Candice Digby, Partner and Events Manager at Vapor IO, a LF Edge member and active community member in the State of the Edge Project

Last year’s Edge Woman of the Year winner Farah Papaioannou is ready to pass the torch.

“I was honored to have been chosen as Edge Woman of the Year 2019 and to be recognized alongside many inspiring and innovative women across the industry,” said Farah Papaioannou, Co-Founder and President of Edgeworx, Inc. “I am thrilled to pay that recognition forward and participate in announcing this year’s Edge Woman of the Year 2020 finalist categories; together we have a lot to accomplish.”

(left to right) Matt Trifiro, Farah Papaioannou, Gavin Whitechurch

With more nominations in the 2nd annual competition, it was difficult for State of the Edge and Edge Computing World to select only ten top finalists. The Edge Woman of the Year 2020 nominees represent industry leaders in roles that are impacting the direction of their organization’s strategy, technology or communications around edge computing, edge software, edge infrastructure or edge systems.

The Edge Woman of the Year Award represents a long-term industry commitment to highlight the growing importance of the contributions and accomplishments made by women in edge computing. The award is presented at the annual Edge Computing World event which gathers the whole edge computing ecosystem, from network to cloud and application to infrastructure end-users and developers while also sharing edge best practices.

The annual Edge Woman of the Year Award is presented to outstanding female and non-binary professionals in edge computing for outstanding performance in their roles elevating Edge. The 2020 award committee selected the following 10 finalists for their excellent work in the named categories:

Leadership in Edge Startups
- Kathy Do, VP, Finance and Operations at MemVerge
Leadership in Edge Open Source Contributions
- Malini Bhandaru, Open Source Lead for IoT & Edge at VMware
Leadership in Edge at a Large Organization
- Jenn Didoni, Head of Cloud Portfolio at Vodafone Group Business
Leadership in Edge Security
- Ramya Ravichandar, VP of Product Management at FogHorn
Leadership in Edge Innovation and Research
- Kathleen Kallot, Director, AI Ecosystem, arm
Leadership in Edge Industry and Technology
- Fay Arjomandi, Founder and CEO, mimik technology, Inc.
Leadership in Edge Best Practices
- Nurit Sprecher, Head of Management & Virtualization Standards, Nokia
Leadership in Edge Infrastructure
- Meredith Schuler, Financial & Strategic Operations Manager, SBA Edge
Overall Edge Industry Leadership
- Nancy Shemwell, Chief Operating Officer, Trilogy Networks, Inc.
Leadership in Executing Edge Strategy
- Angie McMillin, Vice President and General Manager, IT Systems, Vertiv

The “Top Ten Women in Edge” finalists are selected from nominations and submissions submitted by experts in edge from around the world. The final winner will be chosen by a panel of industry judges. The winner of the Edge Woman of the Year 2020 will be announced during this year’s Edge Computing World, being held virtually October 12-15, 2020.

For more information on the Women in Edge Award visit: https://www.lfedge.org/2020/08/25/state-of-the-edge-and-edge-computing-world-announce-finalists-for-the-2020-edge-woman-of-the-year-award/

August 25, 2020

Akraino’s AI Edge-School/Education Video Security Monitoring Blueprint

By LF EdgeAkraino, Akraino Edge Stack, Blog, Use Cases

Written by Hechun Zhang, Staff Systems Engineer, Baidu; Akraino TSC member, and PTL of the AI Edge Blueprint; and Tina Tsou, Enterprise Architect, Arm and Akraino TSC Co-Chair

In order to support end-to-end edge solutions from the Akraino community, Akraino uses blueprint concepts to address specific Edge use cases. A Blueprint is a declarative configuration of the entire stack i.e., edge platform that can support edge workloads and edge APIs. In order to address specific use cases, a reference architecture is developed by the community.

The School/Education Video Security Monitoring Blueprint belongs to the AI Edge Blueprint family. It focuses on establishing an open source MEC platform that combined with AI capacities at the Edge. In this blueprint, latest technologies and frameworks like micro-service framework, Kata container, 5G accelerating, and open API have been integrated to build a industry-leading edge cloud architecture that could provide comprehensive computing acceleration support at the edge. And with this MEC platform, Baidu has expanded AI implementation across products and services to improve safety and engagement in places such as factories, industrial parks, catering services, and classrooms that rely on AI-assisted surveillance.

Value Proposition

Establish an open-source edge infrastructure on which each member company can develop its own AI applications, e.g. video security monitoring.
Contribute use cases which help customers adopt video security monitoring, AI city, 5G V2X, and Industrial Internet applications.
Collaborate with members who can work together to figure out the next big thing for the industry.

Use cases

Improved Student-Teacher Engagement

Using deep learning model training for video data from classrooms, school management can evaluate class engagement and analyze individual student concentration levels to improve real-time teaching situations.

Enhanced Factory Safety and Protection

Real-time monitoring helps detecting factory workers who might forget security gadgets, such as helmets, safety gloves, and so on, to prevent hazardous accidents in the workplace. Companies can monitor safety in a comprehensive and timely way, and used findings as a reference for strengthening safety management.

Reinforced Hygiene and Safety in Catering

Through monitoring staff behavior in the kitchen, such as smoking breaks and cell phone use, this solution ensures the safety and hygiene of the food production process.

Advanced Fire Detection and Prevention

Linked and networked smoke detectors in densely populated places, such as industrial parks and community properties, can help quickly detect and alert authorities to fire hazards and accidents.

Network Architecture

OTE-Stack is an edge computing platform for 5G and AI. By virtualization it can shield heterogeneous characteristics and gives a unified access of cloud edge, mobile edge and private edge. For AI it provides low-latency, high-reliability and cost-optimal computing support at the edge through the cluster management and intelligent scheduling of multi-tier clusters. And at the same time OTE-Stack makes device-edge-cloud collaborative computing possible.

Baidu implemented video security monitoring blueprints on the Arm infrastructure, including cloud-edge servers, hardware accelerators, and custom CPUs designed for world-class performance. Arm and Baidu are members of the Akraino project and use edge cloud reference stack of networking platforms and cloud-edge servers built on Arm Neoverse. The Arm Neoverse architecture supports a vast ecosystem of cloud-native applications and combines AI Edge blueprint for an open source mobile edge computing (MEC) platform optimized for sectors such as safety, security, and surveillance.

“Open source has now become one of the most important culture and strategies respected by global IT and Internet industries. As one of the world’s top Internet companies, Baidu has always maintained an enthusiastic attitude in open source, actively contributing the cutting edge products and technologies to the Linux foundation. Looking towards the future, Baidu will continue to adhere to the core strategy of open source and cooperate with partners to build a more open and improved ecosystem.” — Ning Liu, Director of AI Cloud Group, Baidu

In the 5G era, OTE-Stack has obvious advantages in the field of edge computing:

Large scale and hierarchical cluster management
Support third cluster
Lightweight cluster controller
Cluster autonomy
Automatic disaster recovery
Global scheduling
Support multi-runtimes
Kubernetes native support

For more information about this Akraino Blueprint, click here. For general information about Akraino Blueprints, click here.

August 20, 2020

Breaking Down the Edge Continuum

By LF EdgeBlog, State of the Edge, Trend, Use Cases

Written by Kurt Rinehart, Director of Data Science at Section. This blog originally ran on the Section website. For more content like this, please click here.

There are many definitions of “the edge” out there. Sometimes it can seem as if everyone has their own version.

LF Edge, an umbrella organization that brings together industry leaders to build “an open source framework for the edge,” has a number of edge projects under its remit, each of which seeks to unify the industry around coalescing principles and thereby accelerate open source edge computing developments. Part of its remit is to define what the edge is, an invaluable resource for the edge community to coalesce around.

Latest LF Edge White Paper: Sharpening the Edge

In 2018, State of the Edge (which recently became an official project of LF Edge) put out its inaugural report, defining the edge using four criteria:

“The edge is a location not a thing;
There are lots of edges, but the edge we care about today is the edge of the last mile network;
This edge has two sides: an infrastructure edge and a device edge;
Compute will exist on both sides, working in coordination with the centralized cloud.”

Since that inaugural report, much has evolved within the edge ecosystem. The latest white paper from LF Edge, Sharpening the Edge: Overview of the LF Edge Taxonomy and Framework, expands on these definitions and moves on from simply defining two sides (the infrastructure and the device edge) to use the concept of an edge continuum.

The Edge Continuum

The concept of the edge continuum describes the distribution of resources and software stacks between centralized data centers and deployed nodes in the field as “a path, on both the service provider and user sides of the last mile network.”

In almost the same breath, LF Edge also describes edge computing as essentially “distributed cloud computing, comprising multiple application components interconnected by a network.”

We typically think of “the edge” or “the edges” in terms of the physical devices or infrastructure where application elements run. However, the idea of a path between the centralized cloud (also referred to as “the cloud edge” or “Internet edge”) and the device edge instead allows for the conceptualization of multiple steps along the way.

The latest white paper concentrates on two main edge categories within the edge continuum: the Service Provider Edge and the User Edge (each of which is broken down into further subcategories).

edge continuum diagram
Image source: LF Edge

The Service Provider Edge and the User Edge

LF Edge positions devices at one extreme of the edge continuum and the cloud at the other.

Next along the line of the continuum after the cloud, also described as “the first main edge tier”, is the Service Provider (SP) Edge. Similarly to the public cloud, the infrastructure that runs at the SP Edge (compute, storage and networking) is usually consumed as a service. In addition to the public cloud, there are also cellular-based solutions at the SP Edge, which are typically more secure and private than the public cloud, as a result of the differences between the Internet and cellular systems. The SP Edge leverages substantial investments by Communications Service Providers (CSPs) into the network edge, including hundreds of thousands of servers at Points of Presence (PoPs). Infrastructure at this edge tier is largely more standardized than compute at the User Edge.

The second top-level edge tier is the User Edge, which is on the other side of the last mile network. It represents a wider mix of resources in comparison to the SP Edge, and “as a general rule, the closer the edge compute resources get to the physical world, the more constrained and specialized they become.” In comparison to the SP Edge and the cloud where resources are owned by these entities and shared across multiple users, resources at the User Edge tend to be customer-owned and operated.

Moving from the Cloud to the Edge

What do we mean when we talk about moving from the cloud to the edge? Each of the stages along the edge continuum take you progressively closer to the end user. You have high latency and more compute in the centralized cloud versus low latency and less compute as you get closer to the User Edge. When we talk about moving from the cloud to the edge, it means we want to leverage the whole stack and not solely focus on the centralized cloud.

Let’s look at the most obvious use case: content delivery networks (CDNs). In the 1990s, Akamai created content delivery networks to allow localized websites to serve a global audience. A website based in New York could leverage Akamai’s distributed network of proxy servers and data centers around the world to be able to store their static assets globally, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, video, and images. By caching these in Akamai’s distributed global points of presence (PoP), the website’s end users worldwide were guaranteed high availability and consistent performance.

These days, CDNs are considered to be only one layer in a highly complex Internet ecosystem. Content owners such as media companies and e-commerce vendors continue to pay CDN operators to deliver their content to end users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers. That’s the Service Provider Edge we’re talking about.

An edge compute platform is still a geographically distributed network, but instead of simply providing proxy servers and data centers, an edge compute platform also offers compute. How do we define this? Compute can be defined as many things, but essentially, it boils down to the ability to run workloads wherever you need to run them. Compute still gives you high availability and performance, but it also allows for the capability to run packaged and custom workloads positioned relatively spatially to users.

An edge compute platform leverages all available compute between the cloud provider and the end user, together with DevOps practices, to deliver traditional CDN and custom workloads.

Applying Lessons from the Cloud to the Edge

We can take the lessons we’ve learned in the cloud and apply them to the edge. These include:

Flexibility – At Section, we describe this as wanting to be able to run “any workload, anywhere”, including packaged and customized workloads;
Taking a multi-provider approach to deployments – This offers the opportunity to create a higher layer of abstraction. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files as opposed to physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. At Section, we have 6-7 different providers, from cloud providers to boutique providers to bare metal providers.
Applying DevOps practices – In order to provide the capabilities that the cloud has at the infrastructure edge, we need to enable developers to get insight and to run things at the edge at speed, just as they did in the cloud. This is DevOps. It’s important to be able to apply DevOps practices here since, “if you build it, you own it”. You want to make things open, customizable, and API-driven with integrations, so that developers can leverage and build on top of them.
Leveraging containerized workloads – Deploying containers at the edge involves multiple challenges, particularly around connectivity, distribution and synchronization, but it can be done, and in doing, allows you to leverage this architecture to deploy your own logic, not just pre-packaged ones. Containerization also offers:
- Security
- Standardization
- Isolation; and
- A lightweight footprint.
Insights and Visibility – We need to give developers deep, robust insight into what’s happening at the edge, just as we do in the cloud. The three pillars of observability are logs, metrics and tracing. An ELK stack can provide this, giving developers the invaluable ability to understand what is happening when things inevitably go wrong.

Edge Computing Use Cases in the Wild

There are many examples of use cases already operating at the Edge. A few of the many interesting ones out there include:

Facebook Live – When you see a live stream in your feed and click on it, you are requesting the manifest. If the manifest isn’t already on your local PoP, the request travels to the data center to get the manifest, and then fetches the media files in 1 second clips. ML algorithms operate on the 1 second clips to optimize them in real time to deliver the best, fastest experience for users.
Cloudflare Workers – These are Service Worker API implementations for the Cloudflare platform. They deploy a server-side approach to running JavaSCript workloads on Cloudflare’s global network.
Chick-fil-A – A surprising one. Chick-fil-A has been pushing into the device edge over the last couple of years. Each of their 20,000 stores has a Kubernetes cluster that runs there. The goal: “low latency, Internet-independent applications that can reliably run our business”, in addition to high availability for these applications, a platform that enables rapid innovation, and the ability to horizontally scale.

We’re Not Throwing Away the Cloud

One last thing to make clear: we’re not talking about throwing away the cloud. The cloud is going nowhere. We will be working alongside it, using it. What we’re talking about is moving the boundary of our applications out of the cloud closer to the end user, into the compute that is available there. And, as we’ve seen, we don’t need to throw away the lessons we’ve learned in the cloud; we can still use the tools that we’re used to, plus gain all the advantages that the edge continuum has to offer.

You can download the LF Edge taxonomy white paper here. You can also watch the LF Edge Taxonomy Webinar, which shares insight from the white paper, on our Youtube Channel. Click here to watch it now.

August 18, 2020

State of the Edge and Edge Computing World Announce Finalists for the 2020 Edge Woman of the Year Award

By LF EdgeAnnouncement, State of the Edge

Edge Computing Industry Comes Together to Recognize Top Ten Women Shaping the Future of Edge

SAN FRANCISCO – August 17, 2020 – Edge computing leaders from State of the Edge and Edge Computing World announce the Second Annual Edge Woman of the Year Award 2020 top ten finalists. The Edge Woman of the Year 2020 nominees represent industry leaders in roles that are impacting the direction of their organization’s strategy, technology or communications around edge computing, edge software, edge infrastructure or edge systems. The “Top Ten Women in Edge” finalists are selected from nominations and submissions submitted by experts in edge from around the world. The final winner will be chosen by a panel of industry judges, including the previous Edge Woman of the Year winner, Farah Papaioannou. The winner of the Edge Woman of the Year 2020 will be announced during this year’s Edge Computing World, being held virtually October 12-15, 2020.

Leadership in Edge Startups
- Kathy Do, VP, Finance and Operations at MemVerge
Leadership in Edge Open Source Contributions
- Malini Bhandaru, Open Source Lead for IoT & Edge at VMware
Leadership in Edge at a Large Organization
- Jenn Didoni, Head of Cloud Portfolio at Vodafone Group Business
Leadership in Edge Security
- Ramya Ravichandar, VP of Product Management at FogHorn
Leadership in Edge Innovation and Research
- Kathleen Kallot, Director, AI Ecosystem, arm
Leadership in Edge Industry and Technology
- Fay Arjomandi, Founder and CEO, mimik technology, Inc.
Leadership in Edge Best Practices
- Nurit Sprecher, Head of Management & Virtualization Standards, Nokia
Leadership in Edge Infrastructure
- Meredith Schuler, Financial & Strategic Operations Manager, SBA Edge
Overall Edge Industry Leadership
- Nancy Shemwell, Chief Operating Officer, Trilogy Networks, Inc.
Leadership in Executing Edge Strategy
- Angie McMillin, Vice President and General Manager, IT Systems, Vertiv

“The edge computing industry in 2020 continues to grow rapidly. Once again, we had an impressive group of nominees representing a broad cross-section of the many women leaders in edge,” said Candice Digby, a representative of State of the Edge and co-founder of the award. “The Edge Woman of the Year award highlights the impact these women continue to make across the industry and we hope to draw attention to their advancements and encourage more women to pursue careers in edge.”

“All the submissions were incredibly impressive and the list of Edge Woman of the Year finalists represents a group of women taking the reins of leadership across the edge computing ecosystem,” said Gavin Whitechurch of Topio Networks and Edge Computing World, “As the edge industry continues to grow, we want to highlight the female innovators leading the edge computing revolution, working hard to achieve new ground for the industry as a whole.”

For more information on the Women in Edge Award visit: http://www.edgecomputingworld.com/edgewomanoftheyear.

About State of the Edge

The State of Edge (http://stateoftheedge.com) is a member-supported research organization that produces free reports on edge computing and was the original creator of the Open Glossary of Edge Computing, which was donated to The Linux Foundation’s LF Edge. The State of the Edge welcomes additional participants, contributors and supporters. If you have an interest in participating in upcoming reports or submitting a guest post to the State of the Edge Blog, feel free to reach out by emailing info@stateoftheedge.com.

About Edge Computing World

Edge Computing World is the only industry event that brings together the entire edge ecosystem.

The industry event will present a diverse range of high growth application areas – including AI, IoT, NFV, Augmented Reality, video, cloud gaming & self-driving vehicles – are creating new demands that cannot be met by existing infrastructure. The theme will cover edge as a new solution required to deal with low latency, application autonomy, data security and bandwidth thinning, which all require greater capability closer to the point of consumption.

Join us at Edge Computing World October 12-15, 2020 for the world’s largest virtual edge computing event.

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August 17, 2020

MicroMEC now available with the Akraino R3 Release!

By LF EdgeAkraino, Akraino Edge Stack, Blog

Written by Tapio Tallgren, Technical Leader at Nokia Mobile Networks, Community Sub-Committee Chair of Akraino TSC,Ferenc Szekely, Program Manager, SUSE, Committer of Micro MEC blueprint of Akraino TSC and Tina Tsou, Enterprise Architect, Arm, Akraino TSC Co-Chair

The MicroMEC platform started life as a platform to run applications at the very edge of the network, like in a light pole. We joined the LF Edge’s Akraino project from the very beginning.

To find out what the use cases would be first, we participated in the IoThon hackathon in 2019 where we built a miniature city with sensors, cameras and small servers — also known as Raspberry Pis. Our plan was that we will provide APIs to enable developers to access the sensors, cameras, or other independent hardware devices attached to our small servers, ie. the MicroMEC nodes. It was clear that we wanted to deploy all the APIs as well as the apps in containers. We needed a tool like Kubernetes to help us build and manage the MicroMEC cluster. As we targeted “small” devices, with max 4GB of RAM -at that time- and low power consumption we looked into alternatives to k8s. That is how we picked k3s.

By the autumn of 2019 we had our lab running Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 4B nodes with k3s. We had a successful hackathon – Junction 2019 – in Finland where the teams presented solutions utilizing the MicroMEC cluster. We also added OpenFaaS Cloud (OFC) into the mix and a developer UI to the platform. This allowed developers to write serverless applications for the MicroMEC cluster and deploy them with ease. They could concentrate on their core business: developing apps while MicroMEC with OFC took away the burden of cluster management, deployment etc.

Right after Junction, we were at the Akraino 5G MEC Hackathon in the USA. For this event MicroMEC had to become more “MEC”. This implied the implementation of MEC-11 interfaces and the UI to manage those apps that our MEC-11 implementation made discoverable for customers near the MicroMEC cluster. The MEC cluster runs on Arm architecture based hardware.

With all this activity, we missed the first two Akraino releases, but now we are very happy to join the Akraino R3 release! For this, we had to figure out what is the easiest way to install the stack on the device with a MMC card. The easiest way is to not install anything on the fragile card, but boot the stack from a network server. Eventually we made all MicroMEC nodes to boot from a network server using PXE and the storage of each node was attached via iscsi. This requires a fast enough LAN, but thankfully cheap gigabit switches are widely available these days.

Learn more about Akraino here.

August 13, 2020

LF Edge’s Akraino Project Release 3 Now Available, Unifying Open Source Blueprints Across MEC, AI, Cloud and Telecom Edge

By LF EdgeAkraino, Announcement, LF Edge

- 6 New R3 Blueprints (total of 20) covering use cases across Telco, Enterprise, IoT, Cloud and more
- Akraino Blueprints cover areas including MEC, AI/ML, Cloud, Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, Android Cloud Native, smartNICs, Telco Core & Open- RAN, with — ongoing support for R1-R2 blueprints and more
- Community delivers open edge API specifications — to standardize across devices, applications (cloud native), orchestrations, and multi-cloud — via new white paper

SAN FRANCISCO – August 12, 2020 – LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced the availability of Akraino Release 3 (“Akraino R3”). Akraino’s third and most mature release to date delivers fully functional edge solutions– implemented across global organizations– to enable a diversity of edge deployments across the globe. New blueprints include a focus on MEC, AI/ML, and Cloud edge. In addition, the community authored the first iteration of a new white paper to bring common open edge API standards to align the industry.

Launched in 2018, and now a Stage 3 (or “Impact” stage) project under the LF Edge umbrella, Akraino Edge Stack delivers an open source software stack that supports a high-availability cloud stack optimized for edge computing systems and applications. Designed to improve the state of carrier edge networks, edge cloud infrastructure for enterprise edge, and over-the-top (OTT) edge, it enables flexibility to scale edge cloud services quickly, maximize applications and functions supported at the edge, and to improve the reliability of systems that must be up at all times.

“Akraino has evolved to unify edge blueprints across use cases,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With a growing set of blueprints that enable more and more use cases, we are seeing the power of open source impact every aspect of the edge and how the world accesses and consumes information.”

About Akraino R3

Akraino Release 3 (R3) delivers a fully functional open source edge stack that enables a diversity of edge platforms across the globe. With R3, Akraino brings deployments and PoCs from a swath of global organizations including Aarna Networks, China Mobile, Equinix, Futurewei, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Nokia, NVIDIA, Tencent, WeBank, WiPro, and more.

Akraino enables innovative support for new levels of flexibility that scale 5G, industrial IoT, telco, and enterprise edge cloud services quickly, by delivering community-vetted and tested edge cloud blueprints to deploy edge services. New use cases and new and existing blueprints provide an edge stack for Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, AI at the Edge, Android Cloud Native, SmartNICs, Telco Core and Open-RAN, NFV, IOT, SD-WAN, SDN, MEC, and more.

Akraino R3 includes 6 new blueprints for a total of 20, all tested and validated on real hardware labs supported by users and community members — the Akraino community has established a full-stack, automated testing with strict community standards to ensure high-quality blueprints.

The 20 “ready and proven” blueprints include both updates and long-term support to existing R1 & R2 blueprints, and the introduction of six new blueprints:

- - The AI Edge – School/Education Video Security Monitoring
  - 5G MEC/Slice System– Supports Cloud Gaming, HD Video, and Live Broadcasting
  - Enterprise Applications on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge (EATLEdge)
  - Micro-MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) for SmartCity Use Cases
  - IEC Type 3: Android Cloud Native Applications on Arm®-based Servers on the Edge
  - IEC Type 5: Smart NIC: Edge hardware acceleration

More information on Akraino R3, including links to documentation, code, installation docs for all Akraino Blueprints from R1-R3, can be found here. For details on how to get involved with LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/.

API White Paper

The Akraino community published the first iteration of a new white paper to bring common open edge API standards to the industry. The new white paper makes available, for the first time, generic edge APIs for developers to standardize across devices, applications (cloud native), orchestrations, and multi-cloud. The paper serves as a stepping stone for broad industry alignment on edge definitions, use cases, APIs. Download the paper here: https://www.lfedge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Akraino_Whitepaper.pdf

Looking Ahead

The community is already planning R4, which will include more implementation of open edge API guidelines, more automation of testing, increased alliance with upstream and downstream communities, and development of public cloud standard edge interfaces. Additionally, the community is expecting new blueprints as well as additional enhancements to existing blueprints.

Don’t miss the Open Networking and Edge Summit (ONES) virtual event happening September 28-29, where Akraino and other LF Edge communities will collaborate on the latest open source edge developments. Registration is now open!

Ecosystem Support for Akraino R3

Arm
“The demands on compute, networking, and storage infrastructure are changing significantly as we connect billions of intelligent devices, many of which live at the edge of the 5G network,” said Kevin Ryan, senior director of software ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “By working closely with the Akraino community on the release of Akraino R3, and through our efforts with Project Cassini for seamless cloud-native deployments, Arm remains committed to providing our partners with full- edge solutions primed to take on the 5G era.”

AT&T
Mazin Gilbert, VP of Technology and Innovation, AT&T, said: “As a founding member of the Akraino platform, AT&T has seen first-hand the remarkable progress as a result of openness and industry collaboration. AI and edge computing are essential when it comes to creating an intelligent, autonomous 5G network, and we’re proud to work together with the community to deliver the best possible solutions for our customers.”

Baidu
“In the 5G era, AI+ Edge Computing is not only an important guarantee for updating the consumer and industrial Internet experience (such as video consumption re-upgrading, scene-based AI capabilities, etc.), but also a necessary infrastructure for the development of the Internet industry,” said Ning Liu, Director of AI Cloud Group, Baidu. “Providing users with AI-capable edge computing platforms, products and services is one of Baidu’s core strategies. Looking towards the future, Baidu will continue to adhere to the core strategy of open source and cooperate with partners to build a more open and improved ecosystem.”

China Unicom
“Commercial 5G is going live around the world. Edge computing will play an important role for large bandwidth and low delay services in the 5G era. The key to the success of edge computing is to provide integrated ICT PaaS capabilities, which is beneficial for the collaboration between networks and services, maximizing the value of 5G,” said Xiongyan Tang, Chief Scientist and CTO of the Network Technology Research Institute of China Unicom. “The PCEI Blueprint will define a set of open and common APIs, to promote the deep cooperation between operators and OTTs, and help to build a unified network edge ecosystem.”

Huawei
“High bandwidth, low latency, and massive connections are 5G typical features. Based on MEC’s edge computing and open capabilities, 5G network could build the connection, computing, and capabilities required by vertical industries and enables many applications. In the future, 5G MEC will be an open system that provides an application platform with rich atomic capabilities,” said by Bill Ren, Huawei Chief Open Source Liaison Officer. “Managing a large number of applications and devices on the MEC brings great challenges and increases learning costs for developers. We hope to make 5G available through open source, so that more industry partners and developers can easily develop and invoke 5G capabilities. Build a common foundation for carriers’ MEC through open source to ensure the consistency of open interfaces and models. Only in this way can 5G MEC bring tangible benefits to developers and users.”

Juniper Networks
“Juniper Networks is proud to have been an early member of the Akraino community and supportive of this important work. We congratulate this community for introducing new blueprints to expand the use cases for managed edge cloud with this successful third release,” said Raj Yavatkar, Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks. “Juniper is actively involved in the integration of multiple blueprints and we look forward to applying these solutions to evolve edge cloud and 5G private networks to spur new service innovations – from content streaming to autonomous vehicles.”

Tencent
“The new generation network is coming, IoT and Edge Computing are developing rapidly. At the same time, it also brings great challenges to technological innovation. High performance, low latency, high scalability, large-scale architecture is a must for all applications. TARS has released the latest version to meet the adjustment of 5G and Edge Computing. Massive devices can easily use TARS Microservice Architecture to realize the innovation of edge applications. The Connect Vehicle Blueprint and AR/VR Blueprint in Akraino are all using the TARS Architecture,” said Mark Shan, Chairman of Tencent Open Source Alliance, Chairman of TARS Foundation, and Akraino TSC Member. “The blueprints on the TARS Architecture solve the problem of high throughput and low latency. TARS is a neutral project in the Linux Foundation, which can be easily used and helped by anyone from the open-source community.”

Zenlayer
“We are proud to be part of the Edge Cloud community. Zenlayer is actively exploring edge solutions and integrating the solutions to our bare metal product. We hope the edge products will empower rapid customer innovation in video streaming, gaming, enterprise applications and more,” said Jim XU, chief engineering architect of Zenlayer.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

August 12, 2020

The Over the Edge Podcast

By LF EdgeBlog, State of the Edge

If you ask 100 people to define edge, you might get 112 different answers, but we do know this much: Edge computing represents a long-term transformation of the Internet that could take decades to fully materialize.

Over The Edge is a podcast about edge computing and those in the industry who are creating the future of the internet. On the show we talk to corporate leaders, open-source experts, technologists, journalists, analysts, and the community at large, to discuss technological innovations, trends, practical applications, business models, and the occasional far-flung theory. Over the Edge is brought to you by the sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

Listen to the podcast here: OverTheEdgePodcast.com

Check out some of the LF Edge member interviews:

July 29 – Matt Trifiro, VaporIO

July 29 – Galeal Zino, Netfoundry

July 29 – Jacob Smith, Packet

August 5 – Joe Zhu, Zenlayer

August 19 – Malini Bhandaru, VMware

August 26 – Jason Shepherd, ZEDEDA

August 11, 2020

EdgeX Foundry Welcomes New Contributors for Q2

By LF EdgeBlog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Aaron Williams, LF Edge Developer Advocate

The second quarter has been really busy for the EdgeX community. We released Geneva and are working hard on Hanoi, our fall release. This release was made possible through the hard work of 52 community members contributing code in GitHub over the past three months. Over the past three years, EdgeX has enjoyed 117 unique contributors and the community is continuously growing. We want to welcome and recognize our four first time contributors from Q2.

We encourage our new contributors to keep up the great work and we look forward to their next contribution. You are helping to improve and grow EdgeX and our community.

Q2 New Contributors’ Usernames:

nbfhscl

bill-mahoney

charles-knox-intel

wogsland

You can find these contributors on github and see what other projects they are working on.

We would be remiss if we didn’t thank our other contributors who posted code, help with documentation, or answered questions on our slack workspace in Q2. We had over 80k lines of code committed from 50 unique (66 YTD) developers making 665 commits (1.3k YTD). And here are our top ten committers for the second quarter:

lenny-intel	tonyespy
ernestojeda	rsdmike
cherrycl	difince
lranjbar	iain-anderson
hahattan	jamesrgregg

You can find most of them on our slack workspace (edgexfoundry.slack.com) where we have had over 2000 messages from 101 members! On our slack channels, you can ask questions and get help, or you can follow our working groups’ channels.

Do you want to get involved with EdgeX Foundry-The World’s First Plug and Play Ecosystem-Enabled Open Platform for the IoT Edge or just learn more about the project and how to get started? Either way, visit our Getting Started page and you will find everything that you need to get going. We don’t just need developers, we could use tech writers, translators, and many other disciplines.

EdgeX Foundry is an open source project hosted by LF Edge that is building a common open platform for IoT Edge computing. The interoperable platform enables an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions across a wide variety of industrial and enterprise use cases.

EdgeX is unique in its scope, broad industry support, credibility, investment, vendor-neutrality, and Apache 2.0 open source licensing model. As such, EdgeX is a key enabler of digital transformation for IoT Use Cases and businesses across many different vertical markets.

EdgeX offers all interested developers or companies the opportunity to collaborate on IoT solutions built using existing connectivity standards combined with their own proprietary innovations.

Visit the EdgeX Foundry website for more information or join our Slack to ask questions and engage with community members. If you are not already a member of our community, it is really easy to join. Simply visit our wiki page and/or check out our Git Hub and help us get to the next 6 million and more downloads!

August 6, 2020

OpenAirInterface End User Case Study – Running 5G on Akraino’s KNI Provider Access Edge Blueprint

By LF EdgeAkraino Edge Stack, Blog, Use Cases

Written by Ricardo Noriega, Project Team Lead, Akraino Kubernetes Native Infrastructure Blueprint Family, and Raymond Knopp, Executive Committee member of the OpenAirInterface Alliance

Overview

Blueprints in the Akraino Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Blueprint Family leverage the best-practices and tools from the Kubernetes community to declaratively manage edge computing stacks at scale and with a consistent, uniform user experience from the infrastructure up to the services and from developer environments to production environments on bare metal or on public cloud.

One of the many use cases that the KNI blueprint family covers is the Provider Access Edge (PAE). The need for deploying mobile application on the edge is growing in latest times. Providing a platform that is capable of supporting deployment of mobile applications, using Kubernetes, and based on kubernetes tooling and declarative configuration from end to end is needed.

The OpenAirInterface project fosters a community of industrial as well as research contributors for software and hardware development for the core network (EPC) and access network and user equipment (EUTRAN) of 3GPP cellular networks. The OpenAirInterface alliance, has chosen the Akraino KNI PAE blueprint as the reference platform to develop, test and deploy its 4G and 5G open source mobile networks.

Key features on the Provider Access Edge blueprint

Telco / 5G network functions are among the more exigent Kubernetes workloads, but they are not unique: customers from high performance computing, high frequency trading, industrial control, et al. are asking for pretty much similar sets of capabilities.

This blueprint targets small footprint deployments able to host NFV (in particular vRAN) and MEC (e.g. AR/VR, machine learning, etc.) workloads. Its key features are:

Lightweight, self-managing clusters based on CoreOS and Kubernetes (OKD distro).
Support for VMs (via KubeVirt) and containers on a common infrastructure.
Application lifecycle management using the Operator Framework.
Support for multiple networks using Multus.
Support for high throughput interfaces using the SRIOV operator.
Support for real-time workloads.
Support for Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP).

OpenAirInterface network deployment

The OpenAirInterface alliance has made a great effort on moving all the components that form a 4G/5G mobile network to the Kubernetes world. Building all the container images and writing the corresponding manifests to match a specific deployment model has been a tremendous work.

To support the 5G network in a production-like deployment, we configured the OpenShift based KNI PAE blueprint to segregate real-time and non-real-time compute workloads as well as management, control, and data plane traffic according to the following logical deployment architecture:

Conclusion

5G is designed to bring to the enterprise world as well as to the regular consumer, high throughput and low latency bandwidth that will enable the use cases of the future like IoT, autonomous cars, and many other applications deployed at the edge of the networks. The Akraino Kubernetes Native Infrastructure blueprint family allows to run these very demanding workloads on top, and OpenAirInterface has chosen us as the reference platform.

References

https://www.openairinterface.org/docs/workshop/8_Fall2019Workshop-Beijing/Talks/2019-12-05-DEFOSSEUX.pdf

Learn more about OpenAirInterface here. Learn more about Akraino here.

August 4, 2020