Akraino Edge Stack, an open source edge computing project aimed at addressing telecom, enterprise, and industrial IoT use cases, is now available with 10 deployment-ready blueprints. The project, housed under the LF Edge group, is an open source software stack that is also designed to improve and expand the flexibility of edge cloud services in the 5G core, virtual radio access networks (vRAN), universal CPE (uCPE), SD-WAN, and carrier edge media processing.

“From a telco perspective we believe that there are three things that they’re extremely well equipped with, and that’s what differentiates the telcos in this world of edge,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of edge, IoT, and networking at Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation launched Akraino in early 2018, and it formed LF Edge in January as an umbrella group for its five open source edge computing projects.

Those three unique attributes include location, latency, and mobility, he said.

“These things are why telecom operators are jumping on edge and moving that core automation and orchestration into the edge so they can enable all these new services,” Joshipura said. “The acceptance and participation from other companies has significantly improved. There’s a broad diversity of members as well as non-members that are using, contributing, and participating in these blueprints.”

Akraino Release 1 includes 10 blueprints targeting the network cloud; telco appliances for RAN, RAN intelligent controller, and multi-access edge computing; application deployment on ARM servers; enterprise edge use cases at high-density locations; Kubernetes-native infrastructure; and an IoT gateway.

“Our view is from a telecom perspective, the network cloud blueprint and the radio edge cloud blueprints are a no-brainer. We are seeing the rest of the telcos not only look at it, but suggest a few enhancements to these blueprints,” Joshipura said.

Kandan Kathirvel, a director at AT&T responsible for the operator’s cloud strategy and chair of the technical steering committee for Akraino, concurred with that assessment. “The radio edge cloud is primarily focused on the RAN deployment,” he said. “The 5G deployment is really going to be based on these RAN deployments because that’s where virtualization and the RAN intelligent controller is needed to really scale 5G.”

O-RAN in particular has already been widely adopted by network operators, according to Kathirvel. AT&T has also been testing and contributing to the network cloud blueprint, he added. “We do believe these blueprints are very critical for a full deployment of 5G.”

LF Edge plans to update Akraino on a recurring six-month cycle with the next version including another five blueprints, Joshipura explained. “I think our next phase where each application is being looked at for that particular vertical, that’s when we start gaining a lot more traction and deployment — not just participation. It’s going to be picked up by the industry,” he said.

LF Edge has five projects underway and a pipeline of five more in the works, but Akraino along with EdgeX Foundry are the two “most mature projects” to date, Joshipura explained. Akraino Release 2, which is on schedule for release by the end of this year, will include blueprints for defined edge APIs and new community lab hardware.