Building an Edge Computing Platform for Network Services Using Cloud Native Technology [I]

Edge computing have become increasingly important due to the demands of latency sensitive applications and explosion of data from end user devices in cases such as Internet of Things (IoT). One common …

Edge computing have become increasingly important due to the demands of latency sensitive applications and explosion of data from end user devices in cases such as Internet of Things (IoT). One common intelligent edge deployment is the buildout of mini data centers on network edge that are centrally managed and operated by the cloud. Unlike traditional data centers, these mini data centers are constrained by limited resources and minimal operational supervision, and as such they impose challenges on traditional data center infrastructure including network services, here defined as L3-7 network services such as packet gateway and application firewall. These services usually are implemented with the need for heavy manual configurations and complex provisioning, which are particularly ill-fitted to deploy at the edge. In this session we will discuss how we built a new edge computing platform for network services that can achieve auto provisioning, dynamic service deployments and updates, and high resiliency. By running componentized network services in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, and utilizing projects such as gRPC, linkerd, and fluentd, as well as making use of cloud native related projects including etcd and IOvisor, this platform essentially treats network services as cloud native applications, and thereby able to achieve the associated benefits. We will show a demo of the platform as part of the presentation.