Blueprint overview/Introduction

This document covers both Integrated Edge Cloud Type 1 & 2.

Integrated Edge Cloud(IEC) is an Akraino approved blueprint family and part of Akraino Edge Stack, which intends to develop a fully integrated edge infrastructure solution, and the project is completely focused towards Edge Computing. This open source software stack provides critical infrastructure to enable high performance, reduce latency, improve availability, lower operational overhead, provide scalability, address security needs, and improve fault management. The IEC project will address multiple edge use cases and industry, not just Telco Industry. IEC intends to develop solution and support of carrier, provider, and the IoT networks.  


Use Case

The first use case of IEC is SDN Enabled Broadband Access(SEBA) on arm, in the future more use cases would be added with the provisional plan, such as AR/VR, Edge AI, vCDN, Autonomous Vehicles, and so on.

Where on the Edge

Business Drivers

The Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) will enable new functionalities and business models on the network edge. The benefits of running applications on the network edge are - Better latencies for end users - Less load on network since more data can be processed locally - Fully utilize the computation power of the edge devices.

Overall Architecture


Currently, the chosen operating system(OS) is Ubuntu 16.04 and/or 18.04. The infrastructure orchestration of IEC is based on Kubernetes, which is a production-grade container orchestration with rich running eco-system. The current container network interface(CNI) solution chosen for Kubernetes is project Calico, which is a high performance, scalable, policy enabled and widely used container networking solution with rather easy installation and arm64 support. In the future, Contiv/VPP or OVN-Kubernetes would also be candidates for Kubernetes networking.

The high level design of IEC architecture uses containerized networking environment:

The edge applications run as containers with container orchestration engine and high performance networking support;

The integrated edge cloud platform provides management interface and programming interface to deploy/manage edge applications quickly and conveniently

The platform supports the applications of IoT gateway, SD-WAN, edge AI and etc.

Under the current architecture, 2 kinds of use cases are supported:

Telco/enterprise Edge cloud – for example, MEC or branch office data center…

Telco/enterprise remote edge locations – edge platform with limited resources, for example, SD-WAN, IoT gateway…

The IEC reference stack architecture is given with the following figure:

                       Fig 1 IEC Reference Stack     

Currently, IEC provides the following functions under its reference architecture:

   


Platform Architecture

The IEC project is for openness, which intends to develop a fully integrated edge infrastructure solution, it provides a reference implementation for hardware and software to help users build their projects.

What is reported below is a list of hardware that IEC community have tested over time in lab trials, mainly on the Arm machine. If you need to understand the hardware requirements of the x86 server, you can refer to the following link:

https://guide.opencord.org/cord-6.1/prereqs/hardware.html#bom-examples

Build Of Materials (BOM) / Hardware requirements

Generic Hardware Guidelines

Compute Machines: By observing the actual memory utilization of ThunderX2, it is found that if IEC is deployed on a single node, at least 15G of memory and 62G disk is required; This kind of hardware condition is very harsh for embedded devices. For more realistic deployments, we suggest using at least three machines (preferably all the same). The characteristics of these machines depends several factors. At the very minimum, each machine should have a 4 cores CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 60G of disk capacity.

Network: The machine have to download a large quantity of software from different sources on the Internet, so it`s need to be able to reach Internet. For whatever server use, it should have at the very minimum a 1G network interface for management. 40G NIC is required if performance testing is required.

Optics and Cabling: Some hardware may be picky about the optics. Both optics and cable models tested by the community are provided below.

Recommended Hardware

Following is a list of hardware that people from the IEC community have tested over time in lab trials.

Please attention: Until now, there has been no performance testing of the IEC, which is our follow-up work.

Device 1

Quantity

Category

Brand

Model

P/N

1

Compute

Cavium

ThunderX2

ThunderX2

4

Memory

Micron Technology

9ASF1G72PZ-2G6D1

9ASF1G72PZ-2G6D1

8GB*4

1

Management switch (L2 with VLAN support)

*

*

*

1

Network interface card(for mgmt)

Intel

10-Gigabit X540-AT2

10-Gigabit X540-AT2

1

Network interface card(for data)

Intel

XL710 40 GbE

XL710 40 GbE

2

SFP(for mgmt)

Intel

FTLX8571D3BCV-IT

INTEL FTLX8571D3BCV-IT Finisar 10GB s 850nm Multimode SFP SR Transceiver


Fabric switch

N/A

N/A

N/A


Device 2

Quantity

Category

Brand

Model

P/N

1

Compute

Ampere

eMAG server

eMAG server

8

Memory

Samsung

M393A4K40CB2-CTD

M393A4K40CB2-CTD

32GB*8

1

Management switch (L2 with VLAN support)

*

*

*

1

Network interface card(for mgmt)

Mellanox

MT27710 Family

ConnectX-4 Lx

1

Network interface card(for data)

Intel

XL710 40 GbE

XL710 40 GbE

2

SFP(for mgmt)

Intel

FTLX8571D3BCV-IT

INTEL FTLX8571D3BCV-IT Finisar 10GB s 850nm Multimode SFP SR Transceiver


Fabric switch

N/A

N/A

N/A

Device 3

Quantity

Category

Brand

Model

P/N

2

Compute

Marvell

Marvell ARMADA 8040

MACCHIATObin Double Shot

1

Memory

System memory

Marvell ARMADA 8040

DDR4 DIMM slot with optional ECC and single/dual chip select support

16GB

1

Management switch (L2 with VLAN support)

*

*

*

1

Network interface card(for mgmt)

Marvell

Marvell ARMADA 8040

Dual 10GbE (1/2.5/10GbE) via copper or SFP

2.5GbE (1/2.5GbE) via SFP

1GbE via copper

2

SFP(for mgmt)

Cisco

Passive Direct Attach Copper Twinax Cable

SFP-H10GB-CU3M Compatible 10G SFP+


Fabric switch

N/A

N/A

N/A


Software Platform Architecture

The IEC reference software platform architecture is given with the following figure:

Platform Software

Version

docker

18.06.1-ce

kubelet

v1.13.0

kubeadm

v1.13.0

kubectl

v1.13.0

calico

v3.3.2

etcd

v3.3.9-arm64

APIs

APIs with reference to Architecture and Modules

High Level definition of APIs are stated here, assuming Full definition APIs are in the API documentation

Hardware and Software Management

Licensing