Blueprint overview/Introduction

Enterprise Application on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge is an Akraino approved blueprint family, which intends to make a complete ecosystem for 5G Telco Edge Enterprise level platform. Platform which can be leveraged by various Telecom operators to give value added services to end users. 

The edge layer which this blueprint targets is the Telco Edge. 

Below are the high-level features which this blueprint will go on to implement in phase-wise.

• Lightweight MEP Solution
• Autonomous MEP Edge Sites. 
• Unified Portal for platform management and for App developers.
• Sandbox with SDKs and tools chains for MEC app developers
• Heterogeneous deployment on Multi-Arch. 
• ETSI MEC Compliant.

Use Case

Lightweight MEC platform, enable real-time enterprise applications on 5G telco edge.

Applications: 

Diverse types of applications in various sectors, not limited to below:
● Gaming Applications, VR Live broadcasting
● The industrial park, Campus office etc.
● Video Orchestration and Optimization
● Latency Sensitive Application for Enterprise scenarios Etc

Use Case 1 

Use Case 2

Use Case 3

Use Case 4:

Business Drivers

The EALTEdge Blueprint is for the Telco Edge, it targets the telecom operators to leverage this blueprint platform services and provide value added service, in return for better revenue generation. It also provide an Application Development Ecosystem by providing open SDK to developer community to develop application which can be tested and deployed easily on the MEP sites. 

Overall Architecture

The Enterprise Applications on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge platform architecture consists of a One Click Deployment Node(OCD host), Center Node  and single to multiple Edge Nodes .

Overall architecture diagram of the blueprint.

Figure 1 – EALTEdge R4 Architecture

CENTER

CENTER Node consists of 3 components.  MECM , Applcm and Developer Platform.  MEC Manager is the central entity in the MEC system responsible for application and service deployment in an highly distributed computing environment, it provides overall view of hosts and applications deployed in the hosts. MEC Manager is the central entity in the MEC system responsible for application and service deployment in an highly distributed computing
environment, it provides overall view of hosts and applications deployed in the hosts.
MECM comprises of MEP manager which performs the following tasks
➢ Application Package Management: On-boarding of application packages and if necessary adjusting them to comply with operator policies, keeping a record of on-boarded packages
➢ Applicatin LCM: Selecting appropriate MEC host(s) for application instantiation based on user inputs, keeping record of instantiated applications on specified hosts. Also carries out other LCM operations like query, deletion, termination etc.

EDGE Node

The EDGE are the components where the real action takes place.  Edge Node components manages  the execution of various Telco Edge Applications, it provides various services which can be leveraged by edge applications for smooth functioning and its planned to provide additional aPaas services like Machine Vision, Video Analytics , IoT Analytics etc in future releases. The MEP sites will be a single node  or a multiple node K3S Cluster, on which applications will be deployed the MECM Application Management module. The MEC Host will be hosted on a light weight OS.

API: EALTEdge Blurprint provides ETSI compliance interfaces specified below for mentioned functionalities:

• MP1 : It is a interfaces between applications and MEP for Service Registry , Discovery and Service Availability Notification.
• MM3: It is a interface between Mobile Edge Orchestrator and the Mobile Edge Platform Manager is used for the management of the application lifecycle and keeping track of available mobile edge services.

Platform Architecture

The below diagram gives a overall architecture of the Enterprise Application on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge blueprint as given in Release 3. 

Note: EALTEdge Blueprint Deployment has been tested on Cloud VM and is not tested on Bare-Metal Environment. Though, theoretically deployment should work in bare metal,  provided hardware and software prerequisites are met. Kindly refer R4 - Test Documentation of Enterprise Applications on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge (EALTEdge) to get details on the tested deployment.

CENTER Components

• MECM: Regulates application and service deployment
• App Store: 
• Developer Platform: 

MECM Components:

• Dashboard: The dashboard provides user interface for the mecm services where edge nodes, APPLCM can be registered and apps can be distributed.
• Workflow / Policy: Provide policy to take action based on analytics like application relocation.
• Database: Open source PostgreSQL database is being used to store the information, Recommended version is 12.3.
• IAAS Adapter: Will retreive the query mep capabilities and kpi information from prometheus and also upload config, remove config, instantiate, terminate,and query an application.
• Host Selection: Repsonbile for selection of host for deployment.
• Catalog:  Catalog displays the deatils of on hosts and applications.
• Common DB: Persistent Database.

AppStore:

• Portal: Portal provides the user interface to publish and launch App applications. and has option for user to comment on the application in comment section and give ratings.
• Appstore Services: App Store services where uploading an App package and verifies the upload.
• PGDB : Open source PostgreSQL database is being used to store the information, Recommended version is 12.3.

Developer Platform:

• Tools: Developer tools are used in Plugin Management, Plugin Life Cycle and grading systems making it more convenient for developers to develop applications and integrate them into the edgegallery platform.
• Workspace: Developers manage their own Application development process by creating projects or migrating projects. Developers can manage project, app package and test task management.
• PG DB: PostgreSQL database version 12.2 is being used.

EDGE Node Components:

MEP:

MEP Provides API Gateway to achieve the below functionalities

• aPaaS:
  • Defect Detection Service: This is a service to detect the defect when PCB images provided
  • Object Detection Service: This service can be used by developer app for various Object detection for example Bottle detection and count for Retail store inventory.
• PaaS:
  • Secret Management: Platform services and developer apps can use this service for sensitive info storing like password, cert etc.
  • Cert Management: Platform services and developer apps can use this service for automate certifications management.
  • Storage: Edge native storage for enterprise sites.
  • Backup / Restore: scheduled backup, disaster recovery for remote sites
  • DB: common DB for applications data 
  • Monitoring: system and apps health monitoring. 
• MEP Services:
  • DNS: DNS server and DNS record management service
  • Service Registry: Service registry and discovery, availability notifications
  • Network Rules management: service for handling data plane traffic rules.
  • AppLCM: applications life cycle manage.ment

Software Platform Architecture

The below image shows the software platform distribution and architecture for Release 4.0.

EALTEdge Software Components 

Unified CLI: Command Line Interface provides the user interface to install the EALTEdge environment.

CENTER Node -

MECM Services: 

• Front End: The MECM-FE management plane mainly provides the registration of edge nodes, APPLCM, and application distribution and deployment functions from the user interface perspective, which is divided into three functional areas. Map area provides switch between nodes in different regions. The KPI, MEP capabilities and application capabilities are displayed in detail according to the currently selected node.
• AppO:  Application orchestrator is the core module responsible for orchestrating life cycle maintenance operation of application. Appo orchestrates application deployment by executing specified process and automated sequence of tasks, rules and policies. Appo is responsible for retrieving the application instance information, edgeehost performance statistics and edge host platform capabilities.
• Inventory : Responsible for registrations like MEC Host, AppLCM, AppStore, application. Retrieves all the applcm records,mec host records and applications.
• APM: Application package manager responsible for application package management including Onboarding, distributing package to edge , retrieves the application package information and download the application package csar.
• Postgres DB: Open source PostgreSQL database is being used to store the information for mecm modules ie applcm details,app instance information,application data and package information.Recommended version is 12.3.

AppStore:

• Front End: AppStore is a market for developers to publish and launch App applications. Appstore FE provides the registration interface to the new user and once login the store home is visible, where user can upload the application package across various industry domains and displays the list of application along with the deatils. User has option to comment on the application in comment section and give ratings. Deleting option is also available in "My App/My APP" section.
• Appstore Backend: AppStore is a market for developers to publish and launch App applications. After uploading an App package, it must pass the test first. Only the apps that pass the test can be officially launched.
• Postgres DB: The AppStore database uses an open source PostgreSQL database, and the recommended version is 12.2. Which Stores app information, application package information and review details of the application.

Developer Platform:

• Tools: Developer tools are used in Plugin Management, Plugin Life Cycle and grading systems making it more convenient for developers to develop applications and integrate them into the edgegallery platform.
• Workspace: Developers manage their own Application development process by creating projects or migrating projects. Developers can manage project, app package and test task management.
• Postgres DB: PostgreSQL database version 12.x is being used.

EDGE Node Components:

MEP:

MEP Provides API Gateway to achieve the below functionalities

• aPaaS:
  • Defect Detection Service: This is a service to detect the defect when PCB images provided
  • Object Detection Service: This service can be used by developer app for various Object detection for example Bottle detection and count for Retail store inventory.
• PaaS:
  • Vault: Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.
  • Cert Management: cert-manager is a native Kubernetes certificate management controller. It can help with issuing certificates from a variety of sources, such as Let’s Encrypt, HashiCorp Vault, Venafi, a simple signing key pair, or self signed. It will ensure certificates are valid and up to date, and attempt to renew certificates at a configured time before expiry.
  • OpenEBS: OpenEBS is a Kubernetes native hyperconverged storage solution. OpenEBS consumes the storage (disks, SSDs, cloud volumes, etc) available on the Kubernetes worker nodes to dynamically provision Kubernetes Persistent Volumes.

    OpenEBS can provision different type of Local PV for Stateful Workloads like Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic, etc that are distributed in nature and have high availiability built into them. Depending on the type of storage attached to your Kubernetes worker nodes, you can select from Dynamic Local PV - Hostpath, Device, ZFS or Rawfile.

  • Velero: Velero is an open source tool to safely backup and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes.
  • Influx DB: Time series data base for user applications data.
  • Prometheus Agent: cAdvisor, NodeExporter
• MEP Services:
  • DNS:  The MEP platform provides the domain name resolution services to the applications deployed in the EdgeGallery MEC, which can be utilized by the device applications in UE. MEC platform receives the DNS configurations from the MEC management, which includes the FQDN(Fully Qualified Domain Name), IP address and related entries. MEC applications can later query or modify the state of these configurations.
  • MEP server: MEP platform services like service registry, discovery, DNS, traffic rules etc.  MEP provides service registration, update, delete, and query related API interfaces. Applications can register, update, delete, and query services through LDVS-MEP.  The service registry provides visibility of the services available on the MEC server. It uses the concept of loose coupling of services, providing flexibility in application deployment. In addition, the service registry presents service availability (status of the service) together with the related interfaces and versions. It is used by applications to discover and locate the end-points for the services they require, and to publish their own service end-point for other applications to use. The access to the service registry is controlled (authenticated and authorised).
• AppLCM: LCM controller and K8s plugin.  Handles the application life cylce, where lcmController is mainly communicates with K8s plugin to upload config, remove config, instantiate, terminate,and query an application. It also provides APIs to query mep capabilities and kpi information from prometheus.

Below are details of Upstream and Opensource software's used in various nodes of EALTEdge Environment.

OCD Node

CENTER Node

EDGE Node

APIs

Please refer the API Documentation link : R4 - API Documentation Enterprise Application on Lightweight 5G Telco Edge (EALTEdge)

Hardware and Software Management

Hardware Management

Currently for this blueprint Huawei Cloud Virtual Machines are being used for development , testing and CD hence there is no specific hardware management to be done. 

Software Management

Gerrit Repo : EALT Gerrit Repo

Licensing

• GNU/common license