Folks -
Here is my take on the Blog post. Did some edits and consolidation. Feel
free to add to what I did if you wish.
https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/ecg-ptg-march-2023-blog
Connecting the Pieces - Edge Infrastructures and Landscape
The OpenInfra Edge Computing Group met online at the recent Project Teams
Gathering (PTG) event to grab the opportunity to dissect the edge computing
space even further. During this PTG, we explored activities both in Europe
as well as globally. This time the focus was on what connects multiple
edges together, both from infrastructure and social perspective.
Our session started with a series of presentations, delivered by Andreas
Florath (Deutsche Telekom), to introduce the EU Cloud Alliance (European
Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud) and the current work to build
a federation of edge systems in Europe. The EU Commission supports this
effort and many other projects, such as Gaia-X and Horizon Europe. These
projects typically have a focus on different, but connected areas, such as
data, automotive or the cloud-to-edge continuum.
The EU Cloud Alliance assists the EU Commission by supporting the creation
and deployment of next generation cloud capacities for the public and
private sector. Their objective is to specify the requirements for
next-generation of secure, low-carbon and interoperable cloud and edge
services and infrastructure, based on the three pillars of cloud, compute,
networking and storage. The EU Cloud Alliance has an Edge/Cloud Working
Group, that organized its activities into task forces. The scope that these
groups cover ranges from the cloud and edge landscape in Europe, through
cybersecurity up to application and data services.
The Alliance executes its mission through activities such as:
- Giving recommendations in the form of use cases, technology roadmaps
and more
- Determining challenges for requirements and standards of cloud services
- Keeping a focus on data requirements, especially in how to best host
sensitive data, which comes with high security requirements
Open source plays a key role in the activities and projects of the EU
Commission, which is often reflected in the projects’ requirements. Some
even set it as a goal to open source everything. Funding levels also vary
based on the the amount of open source components used and produced as part
of the projects' artifacts.
After the overview of the EU Cloud Alliance, there was a review of the
ongoing work defining and building a federation of edge-cloud continuum in
Europe. By 2030, 10000 climate-neutral, highly-secure edge nodes are
planned to be deployed throughout Europe. The scope of the federation
covers the end-to-end infrastructure. The scale of infrastructure reflects
on the edge-cloud continuum, as these nodes need to be connected and
managed without any artificial separation within the elements.
Federation is used to create the connection and provide access to the
components. While these components are not managed by one singe provider
but rather many of them, the aim is to have access to them through a single
platform. If the implementation is successful, the cloud federation layer
will hide the underlying infrastructure providers. It will also provide a
consistent platform, as well as a consistent experience for all application
providers and users. While that might seem like a worthy goal, can one
platform rule them all? There are a few obstacles to overcome first:
- SD-WAN limitations: if the number of nodes grows too big, it will
prompt the need for a hierarchical system.
- The EU-wide scope also posts a complication as there are multiple
infrastructure and application providers that may or may not span across
country borders.
The layers of the stack consist of the ‘infrastructure provider’ layer, the
‘edge-cloud federation’ layer, the ‘application provider’ layer, and a
‘marketplace’ layer, with the ‘users’ being displayed on top. The layers
demonstrate the complexity of the underlying systems, while also showing
the intention to make it user friendly. The requirements include of course
security, similarly to other edge related discussions, on the top of the
list and hardware independence. The biggest challenge that needs to be
addressed is how to achieve fault tolerance throughout the system.
While in Europe the intent is to build an agnostic solution that uses different
open source building blocks. there are other efforts in the open source
ecosystem to address federation-related functionality. Ongoing work in the
global community, includes the Anuket project, as well as MEF, where the
focus is on defining APIs to provide standard access points that can be
used to connect the elements. There are also parallels efforts, like grid
computing, that was in fashion a bit over a decade ago, or Wireguard, which
is a de-facto overlay standard for networking. Other groups are also
working on this effort -- somewhat independently at this point, include GSMA,
which is proposing a federation API, which is already partially
implemented. The GSMA has a strong telecom focus and a private membership,
which is not always seen as desireable with the wider Open Source community.
Beyond GSMA, the CAMARA project and TMForum are groups that are
working on API-slicing
proposals.
It has been true for a while, but the Edge is a very fragmented and overly
complex ecosystem. Just looking at the projects within OpenInfra there are
many that can and are used to support Edge architectures and use cases. Some,
like OpenStack and StarlingX, are already utilized in edge computing use
cases. For instance, OpenStack was utilized for a uCPE use case before the
OpenInfra Edge Computing Group was even created. StarlingX is powering
large, distributed vRAN deployments around the globe. For containerized
edge applications, Kata Containers, which is a container runtime that
delivers security and speed in one package through creating a fusion
between virtual machines and containers, is a valid choice. It
provides increased
security, compared to traditional containers, and the ability to use a
different kernel than what is running on the host machine, it can be a very
appealing solution for the edge space. The Kata Containers community also
collaborates with the Confidential Computing group in the CNCF ecosystem,
which has been gaining increased community interest recently. One member
of the discussion shared a document that documents over 150 open source
projects and libraries that are relevant for the edge. How many of these
projects are primarily relevant for edge? A consolidation of projects in
this space is long overdue.
Last, but not least, it has become increasingly clear that today’s systems
with their massive scale and distributed nature create a level of
complexity that is hard to manage. While simplicity is always a goal, it is
not something that can be accomplished for an end-to-end infrastructure,
with out much more community will and support than what currently exists.
However while systems can remain complex, managing them doesn’t have to be as
long as there is a focus on increasing the tools to support
automation, then operating
and maintaining a distributed edge infrastructure could become a
relatively easy
task.
EDGE COMPUTING GROUP CTA AND REFERENCES + ADD LINKS THROUGHOUT
--
<http://www.verizon.com>
Beth Cohen
SDN Product Strategy
Verizon Business Group
M +17814338553
<https://www.verizon.com>
Hi,
We had a great call this Monday, please find the highlights of our conversation below.
* Scope of the OpenInfra Edge Computing Group
- As the group and the industry are evolving, it is always good to revisit our scope and activities
- Items that came up include:
+ End-to-end edge and distributed systems challenges and solutions
+ Working with the ecosystem of open source projects and groups to identify and fill gaps
+ Defining reference architectures
* We elaborated on ecosystem a little further
- The landscape and perceptions are constantly changing
- Is IoT also edge?
- Missing tools
+ How to improve developer experience?!
+ Developers don’t always have the tools and resources to test their applications that will be deployed at the edge
+ Hard to find vendors to provide the tooling
* Application challenges
- Developers are not very aware of how the network affects their applications, and they don’t always care
- Are we still looking for the “killer application” that will drive the infrastructure needs and development?
- Users want to have more insights into the network, but don’t always know what to do with the data
+ We briefly touched on the CAMARA project, which is a project to define APIs that provide access to network capabilities
+ https://camaraproject.org
As a friendly reminder, next week we will continue our conversation about Private Mobility!
Our next call is on __Monday (April 24) at 6am PST / 1300 UTC__.
For dial-in details and more information about the meeting, please check out our wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group#Meetings
Thanks and Best Regards,
Ildikó
———
Ildikó Váncsa
Director of Community
Open Infrastructure Foundation
Hi,
I’m reaching out to you to draw your attention to our upcoming weekly meeting.
We will be having a session about Private Mobility, presented by David Paterson, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Dell. He will introduce the topic and will also talk about Dell’s activities in the area. As usual, the meeting will be an interactive session where the attendees will dive deeper into the topic after the presentation.
The session will happen __on Monday (April 10) at 6am PST / 1300 UTC__.
For information about the meeting and dial-in details please check out our wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group#Meetings
See you on Monday (April 10)!
Thanks and Best Regards,
Ildikó
———
Ildikó Váncsa
Director of Community
Open Infrastructure Foundation