LF Edge, an umbrella organization that's part of the Linux Foundation, served up the third release of its Akraino Edge Stack on Wednesday.
Akraino Release 3 (R3) includes six new blueprints across 10 blueprint families for a total of 14 blueprints that cover end-to-end use cases across the telco, enterprise and IoT industries.
"The third release is really pushing the entire spectrum of end-to-end use cases," said the Linux Foundation's Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking, automation, edge and IoT. "We create software through the community, but it takes a tremendous amount of time to interoperate, to package, to test, and to productize it so that an end user can actually deploy and get profits out of it."
Two year ago, the Linux Foundation launched LF Edge to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or operating systems. LF Edge includes Akraino Edge Stack, EdgeX Foundry, Open Glossary of Edge Computing, EVE, Baetyl, Redge, Home Edge, Open Horizon, and State of the Edge.
Akraino was launched three years ago using seed code from AT&T. The availability of LF Edge's second Akraino release, Akraino Edge Stack Release 2 (Akraino R2), included six blueprint families and 14 blueprints overall. The 14 "ready and proven" blueprints updated the first release of Akraino along with the introduction of five new blueprints.
With the third release, Akraino Edge Stack brings deployments and PoCs from a range of global organizations including Aarna Networks, China Mobile, Equinix, Futurewei, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Nokia, NVIDIA, Tencent, WeBank, WiPro, and more.
Akraino now has 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.
Kandan Kathirvel, chairperson of the Akraino Technical Steering Committee and director for AT&T Labs, said Akraino has 10 global user labs were the blueprints are tested and vetted, and a community lab that is hosted by the Linux Foundation.
"The blueprints actually include a lot of cool use cases across telco, enterprise and industrial IoT," Kathirvel said. "Also, the community has worked on standardizing the APIs across the Akraino stacks and applications, and we're working with a lot of upstream and downstream communities."
With Arkraino R3, Joshipura said Akraino has evolved into an end-to-end solution that also works with upstream entities such as OpenStack, Kubernetes and ONAP.
New use cases and new and existing blueprints provide an edge stack for connected vehicle, AR/VR, artificial intelligence at the edge, Android cloud-native, SmartNICs, telco core and Open-RAN, NFV, IOT, SD-WAN, SDN, multi-access edge computing, and more.
A blueprint is a fully defined and declarative set of components, such as hardware and software, to satisfy a given edge use case that can be deployed with its own continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). A blueprint family is a set of blueprints that share the common building blocks and simplify the development of those blueprints.
The14 “ready and proven” blueprints, include both updates and long-term support to the existing R1 and R2 blueprints, and the introduction of the six new blueprints:
• The AI Edge – For school and 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 smart city use cases
• IEC Type 3: Android cloud native applications on Arm-based servers on the Edge
• IEC Type 5: Smart NIC: Edge hardware acceleration.
With a six-month cadence in place, Kathirvel said the fourth release, which will include work on public cloud interfaces, is slated for December.