The Linux Foundation Announces Expanded Industry Commitment to Akraino Edge Stack

Intel Corporation to contribute Wind River® Titanium Cloud Software and Intel® Network Edge Virtualization Software Development Kit

LOS ANGELES (Open Networking Summit), March 27, 2018 – The Linux Foundation today announced expanded industry support, along with Intel Corporation’s commitment to open source major components of its Wind River® Titanium Cloud portfolio of technologies and the Intel® Network Edge Virtualization Software Development Kit (Intel® NEV SDK). These production quality components from Intel Corporation will be contributed to Akraino Edge Stack, the open source community creating an open source software stack that supports high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications. These contributions supplement AT&T code designed for carrier-scale edge computing applications running in virtual machines and containers to support reliability and performance requirements.

Intel, along with Altiostar, China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI), China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Docker, Huawei, iFlyTek, New H3C Group, Tencent, ZTE, and 99Cloud will join the open source community working to improve the state of edge computing infrastructure.

While several open source projects exist to help solve pieces of the puzzle, no single project currently meets the need for an edge infrastructure solution. Integration of existing technologies with Akraino Edge Stack will help deliver ease of use, greater reliability, unique features, and network performance.

The Wind River Titanium Cloud components have a foundation built on open source standards, but extended and hardened to address critical infrastructure requirements, such as the high availability, fault management, and performance management needed for continuous 24/7 operation, as well as the low latency, high performance, scalability, and security needed for edge and IoT workloads. These contributions alleviate the challenges of assembling an edge cloud stack from the ground up. In addition, Wind River Titanium Cloud brings field proven and mature technology to the open source community. Already compact and performant for edge computing, these technologies will reduce the effort needed to optimize the packages for deployment, and enable operational efficiencies and reliability. The components include new open source assets, as well as many patches to existing open source projects, such as OpenStack, QEMU and Ceph.  

The Intel NEV SDK contribution provides a suite of reference libraries and APIs to enable edge-computing solutions for different network deployment scenarios, including small cells, macro cells, wireline, aggregation sites, and central offices. The SDK is designed to remove the need for application developers to understand the complexity and implementation attributes of the underlying network protocols. The Intel NEV SDK libraries have already been validated and deployed with Wind River Titanium Cloud technology.

The community has established a lightweight governance structure that welcomes technical contributions from all participants. The technical steering committee, responsible for setting the technical direction of the project, will be composed of active committers within the community with no prerequisite of financial contribution.

“We’ve seen strong interest in Akraino Edge Stack since introducing the project, and are gratified that Intel is taking a leadership role with key Wind River code contributions,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “As we move toward a full launch of Akraino Edge Stack in the coming months, we invite organizations and developers interested in contributing to the community to join us in working to define an open source solution for edge computing.”

“Intel’s contribution of production-quality edge computing infrastructure software offers users new levels of flexibility to scale edge cloud services faster, maximize the applications or subscribers supported on each server, and help ensure the reliability of systems,” said Imad Sousou, corporate vice president and general manager of the Open Source Technology Center, Intel. “This project helps provide an open and scalable platform to encourage broad community involvement, accelerating innovation and edge stack productization across the ecosystem.”

“The industry needs to address the gaps that exist from building solutions with ‘best-of-breed’ components from multiple open source projects. Until now there hasn’t been a single open source platform that can reduce fragmentation and drive the scale and acceleration needed,” said Jim Douglas, president of Wind River. “We look forward to collaborating with industry leaders under The Linux Foundation and contributing Wind River’s proven infrastructure software assets to the Akraino Edge Stack, and we are confident this project will accelerate the industry towards a common open source edge platform.”

Industry Support for Akraino Edge Stack

“We welcome Intel along with other key industry players to the Akraino Edge Stack community. Their collaboration with AT&T and The Linux Foundation will help to expedite the maturity and adoption of edge cloud and enable a new ecosystem of applications and services.”

— Mazin Gilbert, vice president of Advanced Technology at AT&T

“Altiostar uses Titanium Cloud technology as part of our carrier grade NFV platform to support our vRAN VNFs. We are highly encouraged to see this technology becoming open sourced as part of the Akraino Edge Stack. The Titanium Cloud contributions will help create a reliable and mature platform for Akraino and help address the challenges of developing a carrier grade edge cloud stack from scratch. Our customers will be excited that these powerful technologies are now part of the open source community.”

— Ashraf Dahood, president and CEO of Altiostar

“Edge is a new open platform that provides the most nearby services by integrating network, storage, computing, application, and other core capabilities on the data source side. Facing the explosively increasing and massive data, Edge can fully exploit the distributed computing capability of edge devices and reduce pressure on the cloud computing center. Edge plus Cloud is an industrial trend. As the standardization leader of the electronic information technology field in China, China Electronics Standardization Institute will leverage our experience and resources to contribute to the development of Akraino Edge Stack and the definition of related Edge standards. We are committed to accelerate the development of the Edge industry and use of Edge to help our enterprise customers to conduct their business.”

— Wenlong Sun, vice president of China Electronics Standardization Institute

“China Mobile is honored to join the Akraino project. The Akraino project is committed to the research and application of edge computing technology, which is very conforming to China Mobile’s next generation network development goals. China Mobile Suzhou R&D center will invest in the product development of edge computing. We wish Akraino a huge success.”

— Junwei Liu, assistant general manager of the Cloud Computing Department, Suzhou R&D Center, China Mobile

“Edge computing is of great significance to our future 5G deployment, which will facilitate ultra-low latency and high bandwidth applications. And it is also an indispensable component of our network evolution plan (CTNet 2025), which is based on key technologies of NFV, SDN, and Cloud. We hope to join the Akraino Edge Stack project to propose ideas and requirements of FMC (Fixed and Mobile Convergence), and cooperate with other members to create more innovative solutions.”

— Bo Wang, senior project manager, Department of Technology, China Telecom

”The Akraino Edge Stack open source project will help accelerate the construction of the edge network ecosystem. With the new CUBE-Net 2.0 architecture, China Unicom has launched large-scale Edge-Cloud field trials nationwide, and started up the planning and construction of thousands of edge DCs. We have built a strong edge computing R&D center in cooperation with Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com. Based on virtualization technologies such as lightweight OpenStack and Kubernetes, China Unicom is now working on the establishment of an Edge-Cloud service platform, focusing on low-latency and high-bandwidth services such as 4K/8K HD video, VR/AR, industrial IoT, and V2X to promote 5G network reconstruction and digital transformation.”

— Yongsheng Chi, vice president, Network Technology Institute, China Unicom

“Through our collaboration, the Docker container runtime technology is being used by Intel in its efforts to drive innovation around Edge Computing and IoT with its donation of Wind River Titanium Cloud to Project Akraino. This sets the foundation for Project Akraino implementers to use Docker Enterprise Edition to provide container management with integrated security for carrier-grade deployments of a new wave of edge and IoT services.”

— Justen Stepka, senior director of product management at Docker

“Edge computing, as a key enabler of the digital transformation of the industry, is comprised of a huge software stack and also requires openness and an abundant ecosystem. Huawei has established a good foundation on the architecture, platforms, and key technologies of edge computing. Through the Akraino Edge Stack open source project, we will have better synergy with industrial partners to promote openness and innovation, build an industrial ecosystem, and assist in the digital transformation of the industry.”

— Swift Liu, vice chairman of ECC, president of Network R&D, Huawei

We are honored to be part of the Akraino Edge Stack project. In the field of AI training and AI service, iFlyTek AI Cloud uses VMs and containers to provide computing power, and we have done a lot of exploration and optimization to meet big demand from millions of terminal devices. The Akraino Edge Stack project will have significant impact on the AI field to solve the security and performance issues, and we believe that we can greatly promote AI development through this project.”

— Zhijiang Zhang, vice director and chief cloud architecture engineer, Cloud Computing Research, iFlyTek

“Digital transformation is an inevitable trend. We are very excited to see the open source community making great efforts to launch the Akraino Edge Stack project, which will enable customers to build and enhance fog/edge cloud capabilities. New H3C is proud to be joining this project to contribute our technology innovation and consulting services. As a leading provider of digital solutions, New H3C also offers customers a one-stop, complete portfolio of digitalization solutions and consulting services that include Big Internet, Big Security, Cloud Computing and Big Data. New H3C is committed to becoming a most reliable partner for customers and helping them achieve business and industrial upgrading.”

— Lizhong Wang, vice president, general manager of the Corp. Solution Planning Department, New H3C Group

“Edge computing leverages distributed deployment to provision computing power and data nearby to the terminal nodes, which makes service response and reliability tremendously higher than traditionally centralized cloud computing. We’re excited to support the Akraino Edge Stack project, as it offers a workable edge computing framework.”

— Kals Wu, director of TStack Product, Tencent

“ZTE is glad to join the Akraino Edge Stack project. The existing experience from Wind River Titanium will help to achieve a lightweight system and high performance, which is vital in Edge scenarios. We believe that this project could help the community to establish a leading ecosystem in Edge computing. ZTE has been working in this area for years, and we are glad to join the project launch.”

– Julien Zhang, chief NFV architect of ZTE

“We have seen strong demand from our customers to deploy edge applications in the IoT, smart city, and telecommunication industries. The Akraino Edge Stack project is a great community effort to build an open platform to accelerate the adoption of edge services. We will actively contribute to this project by leveraging our expertise in building reliable and manageable open infrastructure.”

— Yongsheng Gong, CTO of 99Cloud, Inc.

The Akraino Edge Stack community is forming now and expects to release code in the second quarter of 2018. To get involved in the project’s formation, go to http://www.akraino.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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