Topic Areas:

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 services that run on these servers; the OpenStack services are containerised to save resources, intrinsic availability and autoscaling:

Control nodes host the OpenStack control plane components (subset of Cloud Controller Services), and needs certain capabilities:

OpenStack 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 nodes host a subset of the Compute Node Services:

Hypervisor

OpenStack Compute nova-compute (creating/deleting instances)

OpenStack Networking neutron-l2-agent, 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 nodes

Single server: single Controller and multiple (one or more) Compute nodes

HA at edge (at least 2 edge servers): Multiple Controller and multiple Compute nodes

SDN Networking support on Edge

Network Function as a Service (NFaaS)

Higher level services such as Network Functions (includes composition of Network Functions to form higher level services) offered on Telco and other clouds (HCP, specialised, etc.). While here the discussion is about NFaaS, this is equally applicable to anything as a service (XaaS)

• NFaaS offered on one or more Cloud Services (Telco, HCP, others) including at the Edge
  
  • Network integration and Service Chaining
  • Security Considerations including delegated User Authentication & Authorization
  • Commercial arrangements including User Management

Multi Hybrid Cloud Enabled Edge Architecture

(PG: In the above diagram, replace "Local" with "Metro")

• The Telco Operator may own and/or have partnerships and network connections to utilize multiple Clouds
  
  • for network services, IT workloads, external subscribers
  • On Prem Private
    
    • Open source; Operator or Vendor deployed and managed  | OpenStack or Kubernetes based
    • Vendor developed; Operator or Vendor deployed and managed  | Examples: Azure on Prem, VMWare, Packet, Nokia, Ericsson, etc.
  • On Prem Public: Commercial Cloud service hosted at Operator location but for both Operator and Public use | Example: AWS Wavelength
  • Outsourced Private: hosting outsourced; hosting can be at a Commercial Cloud Service | Examples: Equinix, AWS, etc.
  • (Outsourced) Public: Commercial Cloud Service | Examples: AWS, Azure, VMWare, etc.
  • Multiple different Clouds can be co-located in the same physical location and may share some of the physical infrastructure (for example, racks)

• Each Telco Cloud consists of multiple interconnected Regions
• A Telco Cloud Region may connect to multiple regions of another Telco Cloud (large capacity networks)
• A Telco Cloud also consists of interconnected local sites (multiple possible scenarios)
• A Telco Cloud's local site may connect to multiple Regions within that Telco Cloud or another Telco Cloud
• A Telco Cloud also consists of a large number of interconnected edge nodes
• Edge nodes may be impermanent
• A Telco Cloud's Edge node may connect to multiple local sites within that Telco Cloud or another Telco Cloud; an Edge node may rarely connect to an Telco Cloud Region

Comparison of Edge terms from various Open Source Efforts

Glossary

• State of the Edge