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Akraino Edge Stack Goal and Key Principles

Akraino Edge Stack Goal and Key Principles

Aug 13, 2020

Akraino Scope

Akraino's Scope covers everything related to Edge, as outlined in the below picture:

 

Akraino scope includes:

  • Development of edge solution to address Telco, Enterprise, and Industrial IoT 

  • Develop Edge API and framework for interoperability with 3rd party Edge providers & hybrid cloud models

  • Collaborate with upstream community(CI/CD& upstream process support)

  • Development of Edge Middleware, SDKs, applications and create an app/VNF ecosystem

  • Create Blueprints (integrated stack) to address Edge use cases:

    1. (Telco/Hosted) Edge: e.g. include ONAP, OpenStack, Airship, etc (e.g. large/medium POD)

    2. (Telco/hosted) Remote edge: Stack scale from single node to Enterprise use cases (e.g. IOT)

    3. (OTT/Enterprise/Telecom) Stack for remote edge locations (1000s) with disaggregated hardware

    4. (OTT/IIOT/Enterprise) Develop a lightweight stack for low latency remote edge and IOT gateway 

Additional Scope

  • Single Pane of Glass Control - Single view management of edge resources across 10,000 + sites.

  • Thin local Control Plane - Develop multiple ways to reduce local box or data center control plane footprint. For example, run control/data plane mixed with security measures, run in network switches, etc.

  • Edge user/ Developer APIs - Provide agnostic Edge APIs.

  • Edge IaaS/ PaaS - Wide variety of Edge applications.

  • Central/Regional VIM - Alternative to Thin local Control Plane.  Remote orchestration of edge compute resources (thin control, agent only at the edge).

  • Edge capabilities like analytics etc.

  • Low Latency Provisioning - Dynamic Micro services enablement.

  • Central/Regional ONAP - Enhance ONAP to support Edge scale.

  • Cloud Native VNFs - Container/ Micro services based VNFs.

Key principles 

Edge computing requires significant efforts associated with seamless integration and user experience.  Also, Edge computing solutions require large-scale deployment, typically covering 1000 plus locations.  Keeping these challenges in mind, the key requirement for the Akraino project is to keep the cost low and ensure it supports large-scale deployments via automation.  The Akraino community to work with multiple upstream open source communities such as Airship, OpenStack, ONAP, etc., to deliver a fully integrated stack. Akraino will supply a fully integrated solution that supports Zero-touch provisioning, and Zero-touch lifecycle management of the integrated stack. 

Akraino will follow the key principles with respect to design, build and run. 

Design Principle

Akraino will follow a holistic design with respect to availability, capacity, security, and continuity. 

  • Finite set of configurations – In order to reduce the complexity, the design will follow a finite set of configurations.

  • Cloud native applications – The design will also include the native applications.

  • Simplified security – The design will provide a secure platform and services while not being a burden for the platform.

  • Autonomous, turn-key solution for service enablement to enable rapid introduction.

  • Platform, VNF and application assessment and gating – assess whether the application is fit to run at the edge. (E.g. latency sensitiveness, code quality). 

Build Principle 

Akraino will be built to scale in a cost-effective way and will evolve to ensure that costs are optimized. 

  • Low latency placement and processing to support edge drivers.

  • Plug & play Modular architecture –building blocks using multiple cloud management technologies. 

Run Principle 

Akraino will adhere to the following run principles: 

  • Zero-touch provisioning, operations, and lifecycle – reduce OpEx

  • Automated maturity measurement – operations, designs, and services.

  • Software abstraction based homogeneity – hide any hardware differences via software.

  • Common platform and service orchestration – ONAP.