(RM Chapter 3 new section on Edge Computing w/o OpenStack specifics)
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/ruggedized.
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, ruggetised 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 Design.
CNTT Network Intensive: CNTT Basic + high speed user plane (low latency, high throughput); Standard 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.
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
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