Hi,

Hereby I would like to give you a short summary on the discussions that 
happened at the PTG in the area of edge.

The Edge Computing Group sessions took place on Tuesday where our main activity 
was to draw an overall architecture diagram to capture the basic setup and 
requirements of edge towards a set of OpenStack services. Our main and initial 
focus was around Keystone and Glance, but discussion with other project teams 
such as Nova, Ironic and Cinder also happened later during the week.

The edge architecture diagrams we drew are part of a so called Minimum Viable 
Product (MVP) which refers to the minimalist nature of the setup where we 
didn’t try to cover all aspects but rather define a minimum set of services and 
requirements to get to a functional system. This architecture will evolve 
further as we collect more use cases and requirements.

To describe edge use cases on a higher level with Mobile Edge as a use case in 
the background we identified three main building blocks:

* Main or Regional Datacenter (DC)
* Edge Sites
* Far Edge Sites or Cloudlets

We examined the architecture diagram with the following user stories in mind:

* As a deployer of OpenStack I want to minimize the number of control planes I 
need to manage across a large geographical region.
* As a user of OpenStack I expect instance autoscale continues to function in 
an edge site if connectivity is lost to the main datacenter.
* As a deployer of OpenStack I want disk images to be pulled to a cluster on 
demand, without needing to sync every disk image everywhere.
* As a user of OpenStack I want to manage all of my instances in a region (from 
regional DC to far edge cloudlets) via a single API endpoint. 

We concluded to talk about service requirements in two major categories:

1. The Edge sites are fully operational in case of a connection loss between 
the Regional DC and the Edge site which requires control plane services running 
on the Edge site
2. Having full control on the Edge site is not critical in case a connection 
loss between the Regional DC and an Edge site which can be satisfied by having 
the control plane services running only in the Regional DC

In the first case the orchestration of the services becomes harder and is not 
necessarily solved yet, while in the second case you have centralized control 
but losing functionality on the Edge sites in the event of a connection loss.

We did not discuss things such as HA at the PTG and we did not go into details 
on networking during the architectural discussion either.

We agreed to prefer federation for Keystone and came up with two work items to 
cover missing functionality:

* Keystone to trust a token from an ID Provider master and when the auth method 
is called, perform an idempotent creation of the user, project and role 
assignments according to the assertions made in the token
* Keystone should support the creation of users and projects with predictable 
UUIDs (eg.: hash of the name of the users and projects). This greatly 
simplifies Image federation and telemetry gathering

For Glance we explored image caching and spent some time discussing the option 
to also cache metadata so a user can boot new instances at the edge in case of 
a network connection loss which would result in being disconnected from the 
registry:

* I as a user of Glance, want to upload an image in the main datacenter and 
boot that image in an edge datacenter. Fetch the image to the edge datacenter 
with its metadata

We are still in the progress of documenting the discussions and draw the 
architecture diagrams and flows for Keystone and Glance.


In addition to the above we went through Dublin PTG wiki 
(https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStack_Edge_Discussions_Dublin_PTG) 
capturing requirements:

* we agreed to consider the list of requirements on the wiki finalized for now
* agreed to move there the additional requirements listed on the Use Cases 
(https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Edge_Computing_Group/Use_Cases) wiki page

For the details on the discussions with related OpenStack projects you can 
check the following etherpads for notes:

* Cinder: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/cinder-ptg-planning-denver-9-2018
* Glance: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/glance-stein-edge-architecture
* Ironic: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-stein-ptg-edge
* Keystone: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/keystone-stein-edge-architecture
* Neutron: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/neutron-stein-ptg
* Nova: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/nova-ptg-stein

Notes from the StarlingX sessions: 
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/stx-PTG-agenda


We are still working on the MVP architecture to clean it up and discuss 
comments and questions before moving it to a wiki page. Please let me know if 
you would like to get access to the document and I will share it with you.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments to the above captured 
items.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Ildikó
(IRC: ildikov)



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