Akraino Edge Stack Enables Connected Car, AR/VR, AI Edge, and Telco Access Edge Application Use Cases

• Akraino R2 delivers new levels of flexibility for scale, efficiency, and high availability while accelerating deployment of edge application
• Augments edge stacks delivered in R1 – including Network Cloud, IoT Edge, Enterprise Edge, and Telecom Edge– with new and enhanced tested and validated deployment-ready blueprints

SAN FRANCISCO –  January 16, 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 Edge Stack Release 2 (“Akraino R2”).  Akraino’s second release furthers the power of intelligent edge with new and enhanced deployable, self-certified blueprints for a diverse set of edge use cases.

Launched in 2018, and now a Stage 3 (or “Impact” stage) project under the LF Edge umbrella, Akraino Edge Stack is creating 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 edge cloud infrastructure for enterprise edge, over-the-top (OTT) edge, and carrier edge networks, it offers users new levels of flexibility to scale edge cloud services quickly, to maximize the applications and functions supported at the edge, and to help ensure the reliability of systems that must be up at all times.

“The Akraino community has grown rapidly in the past year, and now includes contributions from 70 percent of LF Edge Premium member companies and countless other ecosystem partners beginning to deploy the blueprints across the globe,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With R2, strong community collaboration brings even more blueprints to the ecosystem that support current and future technology at the open source edge.”

About Akraino R2
Akraino Release 2 delivers the next iteration of open source edge cloud innovation for new levels of flexibility that scale 5G, industrial IoT, telco, and enterprise edge cloud services quickly, by delivering community-vetted edge cloud blueprints to deploy edge services. The blueprints address interoperability, packaging, and testing under open standards, which reduces users’ overall deployment costs and integration time. 

Akraino R2 includes 6 blueprint families and 14 blueprints, all tested and validated on real hardware labs supported by users and community members. This release enhances the edge stacks delivered in R1 for cross-disciplinary edge use cases as well as new edge stacks to support connected vehicles, AR/VR, NFV, Telco Access, integration with SDN solutions and project promotions to maturity, with rigorous community standards. 

The 14 “ready and proven” blueprints, include both updates to existing R1 blueprints, and the introduction of five new blueprints:

• Connected Vehicle: This blueprint establishes an open source MEC platform to enable use cases such as accuracy of location, smarter navigation with real-time traffic updates, driver safety improvements, and traffic rule alerts. 
• IEC type 4: AR/VR-oriented Edge Stack: Focused on focused on AR/ VR applications running on the edge, the blueprint builds the AR/VR infrastructure and introduces  a virtual classroom application, which improves online education experiences for teachers and students through a virtual classroom simulation. 
• Integrated Cloud Native NFV/Application Stack (ICN): ICN addresses the overall challenges of edge deployments in a single deployment model that enables Edge Providers for Zero Touch Provisioning support in multi-cloud, multi-edge and multi-party orchestration. It integrates Kubernetes and ONAP4K8s for container run times and service orchestration and supports bare metal and virtual deployments. 
• Network Cloud and Tungsten Fabric: This blueprint 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 plugin for OpenStack, allowing operators to leverage Tungsten Fabric as a deployment tool and control infrastructure. 
• SDN-Enabled Broadband Access (SEBA): Part of the the Telco Appliance blueprint family, SEBA provides an appliance tuned to support the SDN-enabled Broadband Access (SEBA) platform. The blueprint utilizes a reusable set of modules introduced by the Radio Edge Cloud (REC), introduced in Akraino R1.

More information on Akraino R2, including links to documentation, can be found here. For details on how to get involved with LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/. 

Looking Ahead
The community is already planning R3, which will include more new blueprints such as Edge AI/ML, 5G MEC/Slice, Time Critical Edge, and Micro-MEC and more, as well as enhancements to existing blueprints and tools for automated blueprint validations

Don’t miss the Open Networking and Edge Summit (ONES) North America, April 20-21 in Los Angeles, where Akraino and other LF Edge communities will be onsite to share the latest open source edge developments. 

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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