OpenStack Edge Discussions Dublin PTG
Contents
Intro
This page collects the discussed topics of the Edge Worskhop from the Dublin PTG. If there is any error on this page or some information is missing please just go ahead and correcct it.
The discussions were noted in the following etherpads:
Edge use cases
However it was not noted in the etherpads there were lots of discussions about the use cases for edge clouds. As the OpenStack Edge Computing Whitepaper [4], which is available from the Edge section of openstack.org [5] also describes there are unlimited use cases possible. The most prominents are:
- IoT data aggregation: In case of IoT a big amount of devices are sending their data towards the central cloud. In an edge application this data can be pre processesed and aggregated, so the amount of data sent to the central cloud is smaller.
- NFV: Telecom operators would like to run realtime applications on an infrastructure close to the radio heads to provide low latency.
- Autonomus devices: Autonomus cars and other devices will generate high amount of data a will need low latency handling of this data.
Deployment Scenarios
To support all of the use cases there is a need for different size of edge clouds. During the discussions we recognised the following deployment scenarios:
Small edge
This is a single node deployment with multiple instances contained within it (lives in a coffee shop for instance); there should probably be some external management of the collection of these single nodes that does roll-up.
- Minimum hardware specs: 1 unit of 4 cores, 8 GB RAM, 225 GB SSD
- Maximum hardware specs: 1 unit of ? cores, 64 GB RAM, 1 TB storage
- Physical access of maintainer: Rare
- Physical security: none
- Expected frequency of updates to hardware: 3-4 year refresh cycle
- Expected frequency of updates to firmware: ~monthly
- Expected frequency of updates to control systems (e.g. OpenStack or Kubernetes controllers): ~ 6 months, has to be possible from remote management
- Remote access/connectivity reliability (24/24, periodic, ...): No 100% uptime expected.
Medium edge
- Minimum hardware specs: 4RU
- Maximum hardware specs: 20 RU
- Physical access of maintainer: Rare
- Physical security: Medium, probably not in a secure data center, probably in a semi-physically secure; each device has some authentication (such as certificate) to verify it's a legitimate piece of hardware deployed by operator; network access is all through security enhanced methods (vpn, connected back to dmz); VPN itself is not considered secure, so other mechanism such as https should be employed as well)
- Expected frequency of updates to hardware: ?
- Expected frequency of updates to firmware: ?
- Expected frequency of updates to control systems (e.g. OpenStack or Kubernetes controllers): ?
- Remote access/connectivity reliability (24/24, periodic, ...): 24/24