LF Edge serves up second helping of Arkraino Edge Stack

LF Edge, an umbrella organization that's part of the Linux Foundation, announced the second release of its Akraino Edge Stack, which is a framework to address 5G, IoT, AI and a range of edge use cases.

A 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 and Open Glossary of Edge Computing, all of which were formerly stand-alone projects at The Linux Foundation.

Akraino was launched two years ago using seed code from AT&T. The availability of LF Edge's second Akraino release, Akraino Edge Stack Release 2 (Akraino R2), includes 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.

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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. 

"Akraino is one of the key open source communities that is accelerating the openness to 5G implementation," said AT&T's Mazin Gilbert, vice president of advanced technology and systems, in an email to FierceTelecom. "AT&T will continue to collaborate with other telco operators and vendors in accelerating 5G innovations and production innovation zone trials by using Akraino blueprints."

The R2 release enhances the edge stacks delivered in R1 for cross-disciplinary uses cases as well as new edge stacks to support connected vehicles, AR/VR, NFV, telco access, and integration with software-defined networking (SDN). Akraino Edge Stack is now in stage 3, or the "impact" stage, under the LF Edge umbrella.

The five new blueprints include:

• Connected vehicle, which establishes an open source mobile edge compute (MEC) platform for use cases such as accuracy of location, better navigation with real-time traffic updates, and traffic alerts.

• As the name implies, the AR/VR edge stack focuses on AR/VR applications running at the edge. This blueprint builds out the AR/VR infrastructure and includes a virtual classroom application for online education.

• An integrated cloud-native NFV application stack (ICN) addresses the challenge of edge deployments in a single deployment model that supports zero touch provisioning in multi-edge, multi-cloud and multi-party orchestration. ICN integrates Kubernetes and ONAP4K8s for container run times and service orchestration that supports both bare metal and virtual deployments. ONAP4K8s is a lightweight version of ONAP for NFV architectures.

• Network Cloud and Tungsten Fabric: A blueprint that implements the network cloud with LF Networking's Tungsten Fabric as an SDN controller supporting cloud-native integration for Kubernetes as well as the Neutron plug-in for OpenStack, allowing operators to use Tungsten Fabric as a deployment tool and control infrastructure. 

• The SEBA blueprint provides an appliance tuned to support the Open Networking Foundation's SDN-enabled Broadband Access (SEBA) platform. The blueprint uses a reusable set of modules introduced by the Radio Edge Cloud (REC) that was introduced in Akraino R1.

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Akraino provides the edge platform to run SEBA in a fully integrated way for production deployments. During last year's Open Networking Foundation's ONF Connect conference, Andre Fuetsch, CTO of AT&T and president of AT&T Labs, said during his keynote that AT&T has SEBA in field trials in Irving, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia.

"AT&T and Akraino community members contributed to the enhancement of the telco appliance (TA) / Radio Edge Cloud blueprint (REC), which is a building block for the SEBA blueprint in R2," Gilbert said. "AT&T is using the REC blueprint in the 5G Production Innovation Zone trials."