Open Stack

Hi,

I hope those of you who came to the Berlin Summit had a great event, a good trip home and got some rest, caught up with work and those who went on vacation had a great time. Hereby I would like to give a short summary to everyone either as a reminder or as a package to help you catch up briefly with what happened around edge in Berlin.

As you most probably know we had a dedicated track for Edge Computing with numerous presentations and panel discussions at the conference which were recorded. If you would like to catch up or see some sessions again please visit the OpenStack website[1] for the videos.

In parallel to the conference we were having the Forum taking place with 40-minute-long working sessions for developers, operators and users to meet and discuss new requirements, challenges and pain points to address. We had quite a few sessions around edge which you’ll find a brief recap of here.

I would like to start with the OSF Edge Computing Group also Edge WG’s sessions, if you are new to the activities of this group you may want to read my notes[2] on the Denver PTG to catch up on the community’s and the group's work on defining reference architectures for edge use cases.

During the Forum we continued to discuss the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) architecture topic[3] that we’ve started at the last PTG. As the group and attendees had limited amount of time available for the topic we concluded on some basics and agreed on action items to follow up on. The session attendees agreed that the MVP architecture is an important first step and we will keep its scope limited to the current OpenStack services listed on the wiki capturing the details[4]. While there is interest in adding further services such as Ironic or Qinling we will discuss those in this context in upcoming phases.

The Edge WG is actively working on capturing edge computing use cases in order to understand better the requirements and to work together with OpenStack and StarlingX projects on design and implementation work based the input the groups has been collecting[5]. We had a session about use cases[6] to identify which are the ones the group should focus on with immediate actions where we got vRAN and edge cloud, uCPE and industrial control with most interest in the room to work on.

The group is actively working on the map the MVP architecture options to the use cases identified by the group and to get more details on the ones we identified during the Forum session. If you are interested in participating in these activities please see the details[7] of the group’s weekly meetings.

While the MVP architecture work is focusing on a minimalistic view to provide a reference architecture with the covered services prepared for edge use cases there is work ongoing in parallel in several OpenStack projects. You can find notes on the Forum etherpads[8][9][10] on the progress of projects such as Cinder, Ironic, Kolla-Ansible and TripleO. The general consensus of the project discussions were that the services are in a good shape when edge requirements are concerned and there is a good view on the way forward like improving availability zone functionality or remote management of bare metal nodes.

With all the work ongoing in the projects as well as in the Edge WG the expectation is that we will be able to easily move to the next phases with the MVP architectures work when the working group is ready. Both the group and the projects are looking for contributors for both identifying further requirements, use cases or do the implementation and testing work.

Testing is an area that will be crucial for edge and we are looking into both cross-project and cross-community collaborations for that for instance with OPNFV and Akraino.

While we didn’t have a Keystone specific Forum session for edge this time a small group of people came together to discuss next steps with federation. We are converging towards some generic feature additions to Keystone based on the Athenz plugin from Oath. You can read a Keystone summary[11] for the week in Berlin from Lance Bragsad including plans related to edge.

We had a couple of sessions at the Summit about StarlingX both in the conference part as well as the Forum. You can check out videos such as the project update[12] and other relevant sessions[13] among the Summit videos. As the StarlingX community is working closely with the Edge WG as well as the relevant OpenStack project teams at the Forum we had sessions that were focusing on some specific items for planning future work and understanding requirements better for the project.

The team had a session on IoT[14] to talk about the list of devices to consider and the requirements systems need to address in this space. The session also identified a collaboration option between StarlingX, IoTronic[15] and Ironic when it comes to realizing and testing use cases.

With putting more emphasis on containers at the edge the team also had a session on containerized application requirements[16] with a focus on Kubernetes clusters. During the session we talked about areas like container networking, multi-tenancy, persistent storage and a few more to see what options we have for them and what is missing today to have the particular area covered. The StarlingX community is focusing more on containerization in the upcoming releases for which the feedback and ideas during the session are very important to have.

One more session to mention is the ‘Ask me anything about StarlingX’ one at the Forum where experts from the community offered help in general to people who are new and/or have questions about the project. The session was well attended and questions were focusing more on the practical angles like footprint or memory consumption and a few more specific questions that were beyond generic interest and overview of the project.

These were the activities in high level around edge without going into too much detail on either of the topics as that would be a way longer e-mail. :) I hope you found interesting topics and useful pointers for more information to catch up on.

If you would like to participate in these activities you can dial-in to the Edge WG weekly calls[17] or weekly Use cases calls[18] or check the StarlingX sub-project team calls[19] and further material on the website[20] about how to contribute or jump on IRC for OpenStack project team meetings[21] in the area of your interest.

Please let me know if you have any questions to either of the above items. :)

Thanks and Best Regards,
Ildikó
(IRC: ildikov)

[1] https://www.openstack.org/videos/
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/edge-computing/2018-September/000432.html
[3] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-MVP-architecture-for-edge
[4] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group/Edge_Reference_Architectures
[5] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group/Use_Cases
[6] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-edge-use-cases-and-requirements
[7] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group
[8] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-Cinder_at_the_Edge
[9] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-ironic-edge
[10] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-tripleo-undercloud-edge
[11] https://www.lbragstad.com/blog/openstack-summit-berlin-recap
[12] https://www.openstack.org/videos/berlin-2018/starlingx-project-update-6-months-in-the-life-of-a-new-open-source-project
[13] https://www.openstack.org/videos/search?search=starlingx
[14] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-integrating-iot-device-mgmt-with-edge-cloud
[15] https://github.com/openstack/iotronic
[16] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BER-containerized-app-reqmts-on-kubernetes-at-edge
[17] https://www.openstack.org/assets/edge/OSF-Edge-Computing-Group-Weekly-Calls.ics
[18] https://www.openstack.org/assets/edge/OSF-Edge-WG-Use-Cases-Weekly-Calls.ics
[19] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Starlingx/Meetings
[20] https://www.starlingx.io
[21] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org