Akraino Radio Edge Cloud (REC) provides an appliance tuned to support the O-RAN Radio Access Network Intelligent Controller (RIC) and is the first example of the Telco Appliance blueprint family which provides a reusable set of modules that will be used to create sibling blueprints for other purpose tuned appliances.

• RIC on Kubernetes on “bare metal” tuned for low latency round trip messaging between RIC and eNodeB/gNodeB,
• Support for telco networking requirements such as SRIOV, dual POD interfaces, IPVLAN
• Built from reusable components of the “Telco Appliance” blueprint family
• Automated Continuous Deployment pipeline testing the full software stack (bottom to top, from firmware up to and including application) simultaneously on chassis based extended environmental range servers and commodity datacenter servers
• Integrated with Regional Controller (Akraino Feature Project) for “zero touch” deployment of REC to edge sites
• Deployable to multiple hardware models

High level architectural view:

Objectives

• Fully automated simultaneous deployment and testing on multiple hardware platforms
  • Blueprint defines exact hardware configurations
  • Each hardware variant is deployed into a Continuous Deployment system that runs the full test suite
• Appliance model automates the installation, configuration and testing of:
  • Firmware and/or BIOS/UEFI
  • Base Operating System
  • Components for management of containers, performance, fault, logging, networking, CPU
• Application:
  • RIC is the application running on the REC appliance
  • Other appliances will be created by combining other applications with the same underlying components to create additional blueprints
  • Fully automated testing includes running full application test suite

Creation of the ISO Image

• Build-tools: Based on OpenStack Disk Image Builder
• Dracut: Tool for building ISO images for CentOS
• RPM Builder: Common code for creating RPM packages
• Specs: the build specification for each RPM package
• Dockerfiles: the build specifications for each Docker container
• Unit files: the systemd configuration for starting/stopping services
• Ansible playbooks: Configuration of all the various components
• Test automation framework

Additional REC functionality

• L3 Deployer: an OpenStack Ironic-based hardware manager framework
• Hardware Detector: Used to adapt L3 deployer to specific hardware
• Virtual installer: tooling to deploy REC on a VM (for testing only)
• North-bound REST API framework: For creating/extending REC APIs
• CLI interface
• AAA server to manage cloud infrastructure users and their roles
• Configuration management
• Container image registry
• Security hardening configuration
• A distributed lock management framework
• Remote Installer: Docker image used by RC to launch deployer

Upstream components that are packaged into REC include:

• CPU Pooler: Open Source Nokia project for K8s CPU management
• DANM: Open Source Nokia project for K8s network management
• Flannel: K8s networking component
• Helm: K8s package manager
• etcd: K8s distributed key-value store
• kubedns: K8s DNS
• Kubernetes
• Fluentd: Logging service
• Elasticsearch: Logging service
• Prometheus: Performance measurement service
• OpenStack Swift: Used for container image storage
• Ceph: Distributed block storage
• NTP: Network Time Protocol
• MariaDB, Galera: Database for OpenStack components
• RabbitMQ: Message Queue for Openstack components
• Python Peewee: A Python ORM
• Redis