(RM Chapter 3 new section on Edge Computing w/o OpenStack specifics)
Alt: RM Chapter08
X.1 Introduction
Chapter 3(https://github.com/cntt-n/CNTT/blob/master/doc/ref_model/chapters/chapter01.md) of this document focuses on cloud infrastructure abstractions. While these are generic abstractions they and the associated capabilities are specified for data center or a colocation center cloud infrastructure. The environmental conditions, facility and other constraints, and the variability of deployments on the edge are significantly different and, thus, requires separate consideration.
Similarly, the hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure has differences requiring different abstractions. In a hybrid cloud deployment, at least two or more distinct cloud infrastructures are inter-connected together. In a multi-cloud the distinct cloud infrastructures may be implemented using one or more technologies.
A generic Telco cloud is an hybrid multi-cloud or a Federated cloud that has deployments in large data centers, central offices or colocation facilities, and the edge. In this chapter we will discuss the characteristics of Telco Edge and hybrid multi-cloud.
X.2 Telco Edge Cloud
This section presents the characteristics and capabilities of different Edge cloud deployment locations, infrastructure, footprint, etc.
X.2.1 Telco Edge Cloud Deployment Environment Characteristics
Telco Edge Cloud (TEC) deployment locations can be environmentally friendly such as indoors (offices, buildings, etc.) or environmentally challenged such as outdoors (near network radios, curbside, etc.) or environmentally harsh environments (factories, noise, chemical, heat and electromagnetic exposure, etc). Some of the more salient characteristics are captured in Table X.1.
Table X.1. TEC Deployment Location Characteristics & Capabilities
Facility Type | Environmental Characteristics | Capabilities | Physical Security | Implications | Examples | Comments | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Environmentally friendly | Indoors: typical commercial or residential structures | Protected Safe for common infrastructure | Easy access to continuous electric power High/Medium bandwidth Fixed and/or wireless network access | Controlled Access | Commodotised infrastructure with no or minimal need for hardening/ruggedisation Operational benefits for installation and maintenance | Indoor venues: homes, shops, offices, stationary and secure cabinets | |
Environmentally challenged | Outdoors and/or exposed to environmentally harsh conditions | maybe unprotected Exposure to abnormal levels of noise, vibration, heat, chemical, electromagnetic pollution | May only have battery power Low/Medium bandwidth Fixed and/or mobile network access | No or minimal access control | Expensive ruggedisation Operationally complex | Example locations: curbside, near cellular radios, |
X.2.1 Telco Edge Cloud Infrastructure Characteristics
Edge deployment scenarios
Cloud Infrastructure (CI) deployment environment for different edge deployments:
Controlled: Indoors, Protected, and Restricted environments. Data Centers, Central Offices, Indoor venues. Operational benefits for installation and maintenance, and reduced need for hardening/ruggedised.
Exposed: Outdoors, Exposed, Harsh and Unprotected environments. Expensive rugged equipment
Cloud Infrastructure (CI) hardware type for different edge deployments:
Commodity/Standard: COTS, standard hardware designs and form factors. Deployed only in Controlled environments. Reduced operational complexity.
Custom/Specialised: non-standard hardware designs including specialised components, ruggedised for harsh environments and different form factors. Deployed in Controlled and/or Exposed environments. Operationally complex environment.
Cloud Infrastructure (CI) hardware specifications for different edge deployments:
CNTT Basic: General Purpose CPU; Standard/Commoditised Design.
CNTT Network Intensive: CNTT Basic + high speed user plane (low latency, high throughput); Standard//Commoditised Design.
CNTT Network Intensive+ : CNTT Network Intensive + optional hardware acceleration (compared with software acceleration can result in lower power use and smaller physical size); possible Custom Design (Please see HW Acceleration Abstraction (url?).
CNTT Network Intensive++ : CNTT Network Intensive + required hardware acceleration; Custom Design.
Server capabilities for different edge deployments and the OpenStack Platform services that run on these servers; the OpenStack Platform services are containerised to save resources, intrinsic availability and autoscaling:
Control nodes host the OpenStack Platform control plane components (subset of Cloud Controller Services), and needs certain capabilities:
OpenStack Platform services: Identity (keystone), Image (glance), Placement, Compute (nova), Networking (neutron) with ML2 plug-in
Message Queue, Database server
Network Interfaces: management, provider and overlay
Compute Workload nodes host a subset of the Compute Node Services:
Hypervisor Virtualisation Services
OpenStack Compute nova-compute (creating/deleting instances)
OpenStack Networking neutron-l2-agents/interfaces, VXLAN, metadata agent, and any dependencies
Network Interfaces: management, provider and overlay
Local Ephemeral Storage
Storage Nodes host the cinder-volume service. Storage nodes are optional and required only for some specific Edge deployments that need large persistent storage:
Block storage cinder-volume
Storage devices specific cinder volume drivers
Cloud partitioning: Host Aggregates, Availability Zones
OpenStack Edge Reference Architecture provides more depth and details
Edge Deployments:
Small footprint edge device: only networking agents
Single server: deploy multiple (one or more) Compute Workload nodes
Single server: single Controller and multiple (one or more) Compute Workload nodes
HA at edge (at least 2 edge servers): Multiple Controller and multiple Compute Workload nodes
Network Access: fixed and/or wireless (5G/LTE, WiFi, etc.)
Deployment Locations:
On Premises
Colocation facility
Vendor premises
Customer Premises
External (curb-side, proximity to radio site, etc.)
SDN Networking support on Edge
Comparison of Edge terms from various Open Source Efforts
Characteristics | Other Terms | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
CNTT Term? | Compute | Storage | Networking | RTT* | Security | Scalability | Elasticity | Resiliency | Preferred Workload Architecture | Upgrades | OpenStack | OPNFV Edge | Edge Glossary | GSMA | |
Regional Data Center (DC) Fixed | 1000's Standardised >1 CPU >20 cores/CPU | 10's EB Standardised HDD and NVMe Permanence | >100 Gbps Standardised | ~100 ms | Highly Secure | Horizontal and unlimited scaling | Rapid spin up and down | Infrastructure architected for resiliency Redundancy for FT and HA | Microservices based Stateless Hosted on Containers | HW Refresh: ? Firmware: When required Platform SW: CD | Central Data Center | ||||
Metro Data Centers Fixed | 10's to 100's Standardised >1 CPU >20 cores/CPU | 100's PB Standardised NVMe on PCIe Permanence | > 100 Gbps Standardised | ~10 ms | Highly Secure | Horizontal but limited scaling | Rapid spin up and down | Infrastructure architected for some level of resiliency Redundancy for limited FT and HA | Microservices based Stateless Hosted on Containers | HW Refresh: ? Firmware: When required Platform SW: CD | Edge Site | Large Edge | Aggregation Edge | ||
Edge Fixed / Mobile | 10's Some Variability >=1 CPU >10 cores/CPU | 100 TB Standardised NVMe on PCIe Permanence / Ephemeral | 50 Gbps Standardised | ~5 ms | Low Level of Trust | Horizontal but highly constrained scaling, if any | Rapid spin up (when possible) and down | Applications designed for resiliency against infra failures No or highly limited redundancy | Microservices based Stateless Hosted on Containers | HW Refresh: ? Firmware: When required Platform SW: CD | Far Edge Site | Medium Edge | Access Edge / Aggregation Edge | ||
Mini-/Micro-Edge Mobile / Fixed | 1's High Variability Harsh Environments 1 CPU >2 cores/CPU | 10's GB NVMe Ephemeral Caching | 10 Gbps Connectivity not Guaranteed | <2 ms Located in network proximity of EUD/IoT | Untrusted | Limited Vertical Scaling (resizing) | Constrained | Applications designed for resiliency against infra failures No or highly limited redundancy | Microservices based or monolithic Stateless or Stateful Hosted on Containers or VMs Subject to QoS, adaptive to resource availability, viz. reduce resource consumption as they saturate | HW Refresh: ? Firmware: ? Platform SW: ? | Fog Computing (Mostly deprecated terminology) Extreme Edge Far Edge | Small Edge | Access Edge |
*RTT: Round Trip Times
EUD: End User Devices
IoT: Internet of Things