Intel is throwing components of its cloud edge portfolio to the Linux Foundation’s recently launched open source Akraino project. That project is targeted at edge computing systems and applications.
The push involves Intel offering components of its Wind River Titanium Cloud and Intel’s Network Edge Virtualization Software Development Kit (NEV SDK) to the Akraino Edge Stack. Intel acquired Wind River in 2009.
Akraino is an open source software stack that can support carrier availability and performance needs in cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications. Edge computing is synonymous with multi-access edge computing and mobile edge computing, which both use the MEC acronym.
MEC platforms are desired for moving computing power closer to the end user in an attempt to lower latency and improve service performance. Services targeted by MEC providers include the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), connected vehicles, content-delivery networks (CDNs), and 5G.
Intel Joins Akraino
The Wind River Titanium Cloud is the company’s portfolio of virtualization products for data center environments. The components being donated to the Akraino project include open source assets, and patches to existing open source projects like OpenStack; the open source QEMU machine emulator and virtualizer; and the Ceph computing storage platform.
Intel’s direct contribution is a suite of reference libraries and APIs that support edge computing services for different network deployment scenarios. These include small cells, traditional cell sites, wireline, and central offices.
Intel is also joining the Akraino project, along with Altiostar, the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI), China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Docker, Huawei, iFlyTek, New H3C Group, Tencent, ZTE, and 99Cloud.
The project currently has a lightweight governance structure that is open to technical contributions. A technical steering community is composed of active committers and there is currently no prerequisite for financial contributions. The Akraino Edge Stack community expects to release code by mid-year.
Scaling Edge Cloud Services
The Linux Foundation launched the Akraino project last month, tapping foundational work done by AT&T in edge computing systems and applications. That AT&T code is targeted at developing carrier-grade computing applications running in virtual machines (VMs) and containers.
The project will work on areas currently unmet by other open source projects, and it will also integrate with those efforts. For instance, both the Linux Foundation and AT&T mentioned Akraino complementing the Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) to automate services from the edge to the core of the network. That integration is convenient as much of the ONAP source code also came from AT&T’s ECOMP initiative that was combined with Open-O to form ONAP.
Mazin Gilbert, vice president of advanced technology at AT&T Labs, also lumped OpenStack into the mix to power IoT and 5G.
“Akraino, coupled with ONAP and OpenStack, will help to accelerate progress toward development of next-generation, network-based edge services, fueling a new ecosystem of applications for 5G and IoT,” Gilbert noted in a statement.
Jim Douglas, president of Wind River, said in a statement that the Akraino project is positioned to tackle current “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,” Douglas said.