The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF’s) flagship event brings together adopters and technologists from both open source and cloud native communities to exchange insights around Kubernetes and other CNCF projects along with developer-centric methodologies like DevOps, CI/CD, and much more.

Aarna.ml, who joined the CNCF earlier this year, was well represented at the event, Oct 24-28 in Detroit, Michigan, with six speaking engagements. 

• Cloud Native Telco Day: Automated Policy-Based Service Assurance in Cloud-Native Environments. Speakers: Sandeep Sharma, Aarna.ml and Sundar Nadathur, Intel. Application orchestration across multiple Kubernetes clusters is becoming increasingly important, but policy-based service assurance and closed loop automation for applications continue to be gaps in the industry. The talk covered an open source solution to address the gap using OPA, the popular policy engine, with EMCO, the multi-cluster orchestrator from Linux Foundation. Get the slides. 

• Kubernetes on Edge Day: Nephio at the Edge. Speaker, Amar Kapadia, Aarna.ml. The talk covered how Nephio is fundamentally different from existing open source approaches, the possible integration points with other open source projects, how developers can think past the workloads to provisioning of underlying cloud infrastructure, and potential project impacts to the Kubernetes and edge ecosystems. Get the slides.

• Kubernetes on Edge Day: PCEI at the EDGE. Speaker: Amar Kapadia, Aarna.ml. Abstract: The Akraino Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint is advancing its maturity and is poised to become a key tool in the developer’s toolbox for deploying K8s in a diversity of environments, including bare metal. In fact, an integration based on PCEI was just named the winner of the ETSI and LF Edge Hackathon at Edge Computing World. Get the slides. 

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon: "Implementing Private 5G Networks for Enterprises with Kubernetes" Speakers: Amar Kapadia, Aarna .ml, and Christian Huebner, Mirantis. Large-scale telecommunication wireless networks built using big iron boxes are things of the past. Amar and Christian introduced a type of private network built using 5G technology that converges numerous benefits of existing wired and wireless networks commonly in enterprise environments and orchestrating Private 5G networks. Get the slides.

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon: "Edge-Native Application Principles - Taking Your App Beyond the Cloud " from 11:55am - 12:30pm. Speakers: Amar Kapadia, Aarna.ml, and Kate Goldenring, Fermyon Technologies. The CNCF IoT Edge working group has developed a white paper that aims to define these principles. In this session we will present our progress so far and give a call to action to join the effort. Review the draft paper. Get the Slides. Watch the video.

• Google Booth Lightning Talk: Project Nephio. Speakers: Amar Kapadia, Aarna.ml, and John Belarmic, Google. Amar and John teamed up to give a brief overview of Nephio. The Linux Foundation's Nephio Project represents an innovative and disruptive approach to open source networking and the cloud native ecosystem with Kubernetes-based cloud native intent automation. Nephio enables faster onboarding of network functions to production including provisioning of underlying cloud infrastructure with a true cloud native approach, and reduces costs of adoption of cloud and network infrastructure. 

The next event for Aarna will be the Open Networking and Edge Summit, Nephio Developer Summit, and LFN Developer & Testing Forum, Nov 15-18, Seattle, WA. Meet us there! 

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The inaugural Fyuz event in Madrid was a unique industry experience that comprised the Open RAN Summit, Telecom Infra Project Summit, Metaverse Connectivity Summit, and expo floor.

Aarna.ml announced a collaboration with Red Hat to demonstrate Multicloud O-RAN orchestration and management for CSPs and enterprise network operators to leverage the benefits of creating multicloud O-RAN implementations. The demo featured Aarna’s AMCOP 3.1 running on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) to orchestrate O-RAN cloud native network functions on-prem and provide a variety of managed cloud options. AMCOP 3.1 now includes an SMO Call Home feature for all NF alerts, a fully Secure HTTPS SMO UI, and full support for the ELK stack. Learn more about AMCOP.

During the Open RAN Summit, Pavan Samudrala, Senior Member Technical Staff, Aarna.ml, presented the breakout session: Accelerating O-RAN adoption through Open Source. The talk revolved around work towards containerization of the O-RAN SMO and the open source efforts to facilitate the testing and integration of network functions. An example is an interop test solution for private/public 5G networks wherein the gNodeB is a CNF and RU is a PNF and by enabling Non-RT RIC machine critical apps in private 5G networks. Learn more about O-RAN SMO.

5G & Beyond (5GB) networks are being instrumented for data collection at all layers providing opportunities for new applications and innovations for AI/ML. Leveraging new AI/ML techniques that understand multi-modal models and inferring customer intents and building new knowledge planes driven by closed loop data-driven reinforcement learning to complement the management plane, control plane, and data plane 5G&B networks can realize the promise of dynamic and efficient autonomous operation.

At the IEEE Future Networks Work Forum event held in Montreal and virtually, Amar Kapadia, Aarna.ml CEO and CoFounder joined at roster of industry experts from industry, academia, standards bodies, open-source projects, and user community to address the challenge of autonomous operation of 5G&B networks. This provided a unique forum for practitioners and researchers to share perspectives on recent developments, evolving landscape of AI/ML based autonomous operation of networks, deployment use cases and business benefits.

Learn more about the session (available on-demand through Nov 15, 2022)

See Amar's presentation covering IEEE Open Source Orchestration of 5G & Edge Services and learn how O-RAN orchestration can drive 49% lower CAPEX.

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For the last several months, a team from Equinix and Aarna – codename Team DOMINO – has been busy developing a submission for the ETSI and LF Edge Hackathon. Participants were asked to develop an innovative edge application or solution, utilizing ETSI MEC service APIs and LF Edge Akraino Blueprints. The Hackathon ran remotely from June to September with a short-list of the best teams invited to the Hackathon “pitch-off” at the Edge Computing World Global event in Santa Clara, California Silicon Valley on October 10th-12th. 

We’re happy to announce that the Team DOMINO submission “Build your Edge Application or Solution with ETSI MEC APIs and LF Edge Akraino Blueprints” has been named the Hackathon WINNER at Edge Computing World. This solution uses Akraino Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) blueprint to demonstrate orchestration of federated MEC infrastructure and services, including 5G Control and User Plane Functions, MEC and Public Cloud IaaS/SaaS, across two operators/providers (a 5G operator and a MEC provider), as well as deployment and operation of end-to-end cloud native IoT application making use of 5G access and distributed both across geographic locations and across hybrid MEC (edge cloud) and Public Cloud (SaaS) infrastructure.

A big congratulations to Oleg Berzin and Vivekanandan Muthukrishnan on crafting and presenting the winning submission and congratulations as well to the other finalists. And finally, a big “thank you”  to the event hosts ETSI and LF Edge. 

The winning submission demonstrates orchestration of federated MEC infrastructure and 

services, including:

• Bare metal, interconnection, virtual routing for MEC and Public Cloud IaaS/SaaS, across two operators/providers (a 5G operator and a MEC provider)
• 5G Control and User Plane Functions
• Deployment and operation of end-to-end cloud native IoT application making use of 5G access and distributed both across geographic locations and across hybrid MEC (edge cloud) and Public Cloud (SaaS) infrastructure

By orchestrating, bare metal servers and their software stack, 5G control plane and user plane functions, interconnection between the 5G provider and MEC provider, connectivity to a public cloud as well as the IoT application and the MEC Location API service, we show how it is possible for providers to enable sharing of their services in a MEC Federation environment.

Learn more about the winning submission and get the submission materials here: https://lnkd.in/eVbHfUVc

Want to learn more about PCEI and how open source approaches are impacting the edge? Contact us: info@aarnanetworks.com.

There are three types of 5G RAN customers I run into:

1. Don’t see the value of O-RAN 
2. See the value of O-RAN but don’t see the value of a vendor neutral O-RAN SMO (Service Management & Orchestrator)
3. See the value of a vendor neutral SMO

This blog is addressed to group #2 to convince them to move to group #3.

The thought process of the group #2 is as follows: “I see standards as a way to get discounts from existing vendors; however, I don’t see enough value in a third-party vendor neutral SMO. The “safety” of one throat-to-choke outweighs the “adventure” of disaggregation, even if disaggregation promises innovations, further cost reductions, or prevents vendor lock-in. So, I’m just going to buy my SMO from the RU/DU/CU vendor.”

Chris Lamb’s presentation from GTC Fall 2022 titled “Using AI Infrastructure in the Cloud for 5G vRAN,'' is fascinating. While it doesn’t directly address the above argument, it can be used to do so. Chris starts by stating that up to 65% of a public 5G network’s CAPEX is spent on RAN. Furthermore, only 25-30% of the RAN is utilized. In other words:

65% cost of public 5G x 70-75% underutilization = 46-49% 5G Network CAPEX is Wasted

We are talking $10Bs… if not more; this is a huge waste. Clearly, there are a lot of sustainability issues to consider as well. 

What if this 46-49% CAPEX could be reduced or eliminated? Chris describes a whole array of AI/ML applications that could be run on the same hardware resources during times of underutilization. In my view, if sustainability was your primary concern, you could simply turn off servers as opposed to using them for something else.

For the above schemes to work, the Service Management and Orchestration component (or SMO + workload/service orchestrator) needs to orchestrate and manage the infrastructure (servers, networks, GPU/DPU), transport, RU, DU, CU, NearRT RIC, and edge computing applications. Given that these components are unlikely to be from one single vendor, the SMO  has to be vendor neutral.

I hope you are convinced to move to group#3. You could save your company billions of dollars! And help reduce your carbon footprint as well.

Let us know if you’d like free consolation about your SMO strategy or try out AMCOP O-RAN SMO at no cost in the Azure marketplace.

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By Sandeep Sharma, Software Engineer, Aarna.ml

Since launching in the spring, the Nephio Project has witnessed tremendous growth; in members, participants, and industry watchers. It’s been my pleasure to join the Nephio TSC and begin leading and contributing to this exciting new project. Nephio’s goal is to deliver carrier-grade, simple, open, Kubernetes-based cloud native intent automation and common automation templates that materially simplify the deployment and management of multi-vendor cloud infrastructure and network functions across large scale edge deployments.

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The TSC is made up of 2 SIGs (Standardized Information Gatherings); the Automation SIG, exploring infrastructure and microservices deployment; and the Networking Architecture SIG, exploring how networking challenges can be addressed by Nephio (currently working to automate Free5GC with Nephio). 

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The Automation SIG recently developed a controller through workload application (DNS orchestration) and we are now working to extend it to include AWS infrastructure automation. In this new Nephio Technical Overview and Demo video, I demonstrate the infrastructure and workload automation of the Nephio platform by executing commands and showing the results on an AWS console. By specifying simple intents using the Nephio controller, users can automate infrastructure and workload intent. 

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Aarna.ml is actively contributing to Nephio infrastructure automation as well as network service orchestration and plan to consume this work in our upcoming offerings. I encourage you to learn more about Nephio below and don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions. 

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Video: Technical Overview & Demo

Executive Guide: Project Nephio

Blog: What is the Nephio Project? 

Video: What is the Nephio Project? 

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