LF Edge released the second version of the Akraino Edge Stack, an open source edge computing project that was originally launched in early 2018, and saw its first version released in June 2019. Akraino Edge Stack Release 2 (Akraino R2) includes six blueprint families and a total of 14 blueprints that have been tested and validated on hardware running in labs, according to the group which operates under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.

Existing blueprints were updated for this release and LF Edge introduced five more for connected vehicles, mixed reality, cloud native NFV, network cloud and Tungsten Fabric, and SDN-enabled broadband access (SEBA).

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

The connected vehicle blueprint debuted in April 2019 at the Open Networking Summit with contributions from Tencent Future Network Lab, Arm, Intel, and Nokia, but is now officially released as part of Akraino R2. It aims to establish an open source mobile edge computing (MEC) platform for location accuracy, improved navigation, real-time traffic updates, safety enhancements, and alerts for traffic rules.

The integrated cloud-native NFV application stack blueprint was established to address the challenges of edge deployments by enabling support for zero-touch provisioning in multi-cloud, multi-edge, and multi-party orchestration. It also supports bare metal and virtual deployments, and integrates Kubernetes and ONAP4K8s for container runtimes and service orchestration, according to LF Edge.

The augmented and virtual reality edge stack blueprint is designed to advance mixed reality applications with the introduction of a virtual classroom application. Another new blueprint aims to implement the network cloud with LF Networking’s Tungsten Fabric as an SDN controller by supporting Kubernetes integration and the Neutron plugin for OpenStack.

Finally, SEBA, which is part of the Telco Appliance blueprint family, is engineered to support the platform for which it’s named and uses modules originally introduced in the first Akraino release as the radio edge cloud.

With this release, LF Edge has maintained its plan to update Akraino on a recurring six-month cycle. The third release, which should arrive early this summer, will include new blueprints for edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), 5G mobile edge computing (MEC) and network slicing, time critical edge, and micro-MEC, according to LF Edge.