Intel Corporation announced today it is making a considerable contribution to the Akraino Edge Stack by opening major components of its Wind River Titanium Cloud Software and Intel Network Edge Virtualization SDK to the Linux community creating an open source software stack that supports high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications.
At this week’s Open Networking Summit in Los Angeles, the community will demonstrate how these contributions will supplement AT&T code designed for carrier-scale edge computing applications running in virtual machines and containers.
“We welcome Intel along with other key industry players to the Akraino Edge Stack community,” said Mazin Gilbert, vice president of Advanced Technology at AT&T. “Their collaboration with AT&T and The Linux Foundation will help to expedite the maturity and adoption of edge cloud and enable a new ecosystem of applications and services.”
Intel has joined the Akraino community along with Altiostar, China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI), China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Docker, Huawei, iFlyTek, New H3C Group, Tencent, ZTE, and 99Cloud, all working with other Linux communities, and across projects including Linux Networking Foundation (LNF) to improve the state, scale and interoperability of edge computing infrastructure.
In the context of several open source projects underway elsewhere aimed at solving for edge and mobile edge computing, the Akraino project is more of an edge infrastructure framework, which will accelerate interoperability and integration, for a digital infrastructure edge. Standard enough to eliminate duplication of efforts in software and solution development, the leaders at the Linux Foundation, a non-profit vendor neutral organization, claim also that the Akraino Edge Stack will be flexible enough to support creativity and innovation when it comes to unique and competitive features in the future.
“We’ve seen strong interest in Akraino Edge Stack since introducing the project and are gratified that Intel is taking a leadership role with key Wind River code contributions,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “As we move toward a full launch of Akraino Edge Stack in the coming months, we invite organizations and developers interested in contributing to the community to join us in working to define an open source solution for edge computing.”
The Wind River Titanium Cloud components have a foundation built on open source standards, but extended and hardened to address critical infrastructure requirements, such as the high availability, fault management, and performance management needed for continuous 24/7 operation, as well as the low latency, high performance, scalability, and security needed for edge and IoT workloads.
These contributions alleviate the challenges of assembling an edge cloud stack from the ground up. In addition, Wind River Titanium Cloud brings field proven and mature technology to the open source community. Already compact and high performing for edge computing, these technologies will reduce the effort needed to optimize the packages for deployment and enable operational efficiencies and reliability. The components include new open source assets, as well as many patches to existing open source projects, such as OpenStack, QEMU and Ceph.
“Intel’s contribution of production-quality edge computing infrastructure software offers users new levels of flexibility to scale edge cloud services faster, maximize the applications or subscribers supported on each server, and help ensure the reliability of systems,” said Imad Sousou, corporate vice president and general manager of the Open Source Technology Center, Intel. “This project helps provide an open and scalable platform to encourage broad community involvement, accelerating innovation and edge stack productization across the ecosystem.”
The Intel NEV SDK contribution provides a suite of reference libraries and APIs to enable edge-computing solutions for different network deployment scenarios, including small cells, macro cells, wireline, aggregation sites, and central offices. The SDK is designed to remove the need for application developers to understand the complexity and implementation attributes of the underlying network protocols. The Intel NEV SDK libraries have already been validated and deployed with Wind River Titanium Cloud technology.
“The industry needs to address the gaps that exist from building solutions with ‘best-of-breed’ components from multiple open source projects. Until now there hasn’t been a single open source platform that can reduce fragmentation and drive the scale and acceleration needed,” said Jim Douglas, president of Wind River, an Intel company. “We are thrilled to be working with the Linux Foundation and industry leaders to contribute Wind River’s proven infrastructure software assets to the Akraino Edge Stack, and we are confident this project will accelerate the industry towards a common open source edge platform.”
The community has established a lightweight governance structure that welcomes technical contributions from all participants. The technical steering committee, responsible for setting the technical direction of the project, will be composed of active committers within the community with no prerequisite of financial contribution.
The Akraino Edge Stack community is forming now and expects to release code in the second quarter of 2018. To get involved in the project’s formation, go to http://www.akraino.org.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
