The Linux Foundation’s LF Edge project announced the first release of the Akraino Edge Stack with 10 “blueprints” for different edge computing scenarios. Also: LF Edge recently announced new members and the transfer of seed code from Zededa to Project EVE.

The Akraino Edge Stack project, which earlier this year was folded into the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge umbrella initiative for open source edge computing, announced the availability of Akraino Edge Stack Release 1 (Akraino R1). Last month, LF Edge announced new members and further momentum behind its Project EVE edge technology. More recently Linux Journal’s Doc Searls published a piece on the LF’s 5G efforts and argued for more grass-roots involvement in LF Edge (see farther below).

Based largely on code contributions from AT&T, the open source Akraino Edge Stack intends to standardize similar concepts for use on edge telecom and networking systems in addition to IoT gateways. Akraino R1 “provides a high-availability cloud stack optimized for edge computing systems and applications, and is “designed to improve the state of edge cloud infrastructure for enterprise edge, OTT edge, and carrier edge networks,” says LF Edge. Features include flexible scaling of edge cloud services and alwayson reliability.

Akraino comprises 11+ blueprint families with 19+ specific blueprints under development to support a variety of edge use cases. The R1 release offers 10 “ready and proven” blueprints, including the following:

• Radio Edge Cloud (REC) — Part of the Telco Appliance Blueprint Family, REC is a telco- grade edge cloud platform for containers. It’s primarily designed to support a real-time RAN Intelligent Controller that enables external applications to control aspects of the 5G radio network.
• Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) Type 1 (Small Edge) & 2 (Medium Edge) — The telco-focused, Arm-compatible IEC enables “new functionalities and business models on the network edge.” It’s designed for small and medium deployments of “Edge Cloud.”
• Network Cloud — This family of blueprints enables hardware configuration and fully automated deployment of multiple edge sites from a remote Regional Controller. Specific blueprints include Unicycle with SR-IOV, Unicycle with OVS-DPDK, and Rover.
• StarlingX Far Edge Distributed Cloud — Based on the Intel and Wind River backed StarlingX project, this blueprint addresses edge and “far edge” use cases at high-density locations such as malls, airports, and sports stadiums to support local services such as caching, processing, and analytics.
• Edge Lightweight and IOT (ELIOT) — The lightweight ELIOT blueprint supports use cases for IOT gateway and uCPE (SD-WAN), including industrial IoT, smart cities, and uCPE. It supports edge nodes with limited hardware capacity.
• Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Provider Access Edge — Leveraging best practices from Kubernetes, the KNI blueprint is intended to manage edge computing stacks at scale “and with a consistent, uniform user experience from the infrastructure up to the workloads, on bare metal or public cloud.”

LF Edge is now working on Akraino R2, which will include both new blueprints and enhancements to existing blueprints. The R2 release will also offer tools for automated blueprint validations, defined edge API’s, and new community lab hardware.

 
Project EVE gets it code

The LF Edge’s Project EVE is now officially underway as Zededa fulfilled its promise to kickstart the project by releasing an open source version of its cloud-native based virtualization engine for embedded containers. Project EVE combines the Akraino Edge Stack with the EdgeX Foundry industrial IoT middleware stack.

Silo’d IoT cloud platforms (left) vs. Project EVE
Source: Zededa
(click image to enlarge)

Project EVE is designed to enable edge gateways and devices to “run a variety of edge workloads simultaneously, decoupling application management from the underlying hardware,” says LF Edge. Applications can be deployed in standard virtual machines or container environments and be managed through a standard set of APIs.

LF Edge announced Zededa’s code contribution of its IoT OnPrem Edge Virtualization Engine on May 14. The same announcement revealed four new new Associate and Liaison members for LF Edge, including the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), OTAinfo, and groups at Penn State and the University of New Hampshire.

 
A look at the LF’s open source 5G efforts

Linux Journal just published an in-depth report by Editor-in-Chief Doc Searls on the Linux Foundation’s Open Networking Summit (ONS) North America conference held in April. The story details all the different open source networking initiatives and standards around 5G, most of which are hosted by the LF.

Searls argues that the LF’s open source efforts are vital not only to fulfill the promise of 5G, but to keep it from being hijacked into proprietary technologies dominated by telcos and tech giants. Searls says that only open source can maintain the principle of David Isenberg’s “Stupid Network” thesis to keep the Internet simple, and therefore egalitarian, while putting the smarts in the end-user devices.

Searls concludes by encouraging Linux technologists to join LF Edge, as this is the principle way to ensure that the LF’s 5G efforts aren’t dominated by a few corporations. He says that despite key contributions from major tech powers (such as AT&T, Dell, and Samsung) to LF Edge, “Edge is still a wide-open bucket of interests and possibilities.”

 
Further information

LF Edge’s Akraino R1 stack may be downloaded here, and the R1 announcement is here. More on Zededa’s code transfer to Project EVE may be found here.