SAN FRANCISCO – LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced the availability of Akraino Release 3 (Akraino R3). Akraino's third and most mature release to date delivers fully functional edge solutions– implemented across global organizations– to enable a diversity of edge deployments across the globe. New blueprints include a focus on MEC, AI/ML, and Cloud edge. In addition, the community authored the first iteration of a new white paper to bring common open edge API standards to align the industry.

Launched in 2018, and now a Stage 3 (or "Impact" stage) project under the LF Edge umbrella, Akraino Edge Stack delivers an open source software stack that supports a high-availability cloud stack optimized for edge computing systems and applications. Designed to improve the state of carrier edge networks, edge cloud infrastructure for enterprise edge, and over-the-top (OTT) edge, it enables flexibility to scale edge cloud services quickly, maximize applications and functions supported at the edge, and to improve the reliability of systems that must be up at all times.

About Akraino R3

Akraino Release 3 (R3) delivers a fully functional open source edge stack that enables a diversity of edge platforms across the globe. With R3, Akraino brings deployments and PoCs from a swath of global organizations including Aarna Networks, China Mobile, Equinix, Futurewei, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Nokia, NVIDIA, Tencent, WeBank, WiPro, and more.

Akraino enables innovative support for new levels of flexibility that scale 5G, industrial IoT, telco, and enterprise edge cloud services quickly, by delivering community-vetted and tested edge cloud blueprints to deploy edge services. New use cases and new and existing blueprints provide an edge stack for Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, AI at the Edge, Android Cloud Native, SmartNICs, Telco Core and Open-RAN, NFV, IoT, SD-WAN, SDN, MEC, and more.

Akraino R3 includes 10 blueprint families and 14 blueprints, all tested and validated on real hardware labs supported by users and community members -- the Akraino community has established a full-stack, automated testing with strict community standards to ensure high-quality blueprints.

More information on Akraino R3, including links to documentation, code, installation docs for all Akraino Blueprints from R1-R3, can be found here. For details on how to get involved with LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/.

API White Paper

The Akraino community published the first iteration of a new white paper to bring common open edge API standards to the industry. The new white paper makes available, for the first time, generic edge APIs for developers to standardize across devices, applications (cloud native), orchestrations, and multi-cloud. The paper serves as a steppingstone for broad industry alignment on edge definitions, use cases, APIs. Download the paper here: https://www.lfedge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Akraino_Whitepaper.pdf

Mazin Gilbert, VP of Technology and Innovation, AT&T, said: "As a founding member of the Akraino platform, AT&T has seen first-hand the remarkable progress as a result of openness and industry collaboration. AI and edge computing are essential when it comes to creating an intelligent, autonomous 5G network, and we're proud to work together with the community to deliver the best possible solutions for our customers."

"Commercial 5G is going live around the world. Edge computing will play an important role for large bandwidth and low delay services in the 5G era. The key to the success of edge computing is to provide integrated ICT PaaS capabilities, which is beneficial for the collaboration between networks and services, maximizing the value of 5G," said Xiongyan Tang, Chief Scientist and CTO of the Network Technology Research Institute of China Unicom. "The PCEI Blueprint will define a set of open and common APIs, to promote the deep cooperation between operators and OTTs, and help to build a unified network edge ecosystem."

"High bandwidth, low latency, and massive connections are 5G typical features. Based on MEC's edge computing and open capabilities, 5G network could build the connection, computing, and capabilities required by vertical industries and enables many applications. In the future, 5G MEC will be an open system that provides an application platform with rich atomic capabilities," said by Bill Ren, Huawei Chief Open Source Liaison Officer. "Managing a large number of applications and devices on the MEC brings great challenges and increases learning costs for developers. We hope to make 5G available through open source, so that more industry partners and developers can easily develop and invoke 5G capabilities. Build a common foundation for carriers' MEC through open source to ensure the consistency of open interfaces and models. Only in this way can 5G MEC bring tangible benefits to developers and users."

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