The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and people that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sit down with Lisa Caywood, Principal Community Architect at Red Hat, to discuss the their history in open source, participation in Akraino and the Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Blueprint Family, and the benefits of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.
Can you tell us a little about your organization?
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. We help you standardize across environments, develop cloud-native applications, and integrate, automate, secure, and manage complex environments with award-winning support, training, and consulting services.
Why is your organization adopting an open-source approach?
Open Source has always been at the core of Red Hat’s core values. As the largest open source company in the world, we believe using an open development model helps create more stable, secure, and innovative technologies. We’ve spent more than two decades collaborating on community projects and protecting open source licenses so we can continue to develop software that pushes the boundaries of technological ability. For more about our open source commitment or background, visit https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source.
Why did you join LF Edge and what sort of impact do you think LF Edge has on the edge, networking, and IoT industries?
The network edge is the focus of intensive reinvention and investment in the telco industry and beyond. With a wide array of use cases, and equally wide array of technology options for enabling them, supporting adoption of many new technologies and approaches requires having a common forum for working out design and operations guidelines as well as common approaches to interoperability. IoT requirements aren’t strongly featured at the moment, but we foresee opportunities to focus here in the future. In all of the above cases we strongly believe that the market is seeking open source solutions, and the LF Edge umbrella is a key to fostering many of these projects.
What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the LF Edge community?
- Forum for engaging productively with other members of the Edge ecosystem on interoperability concerns
- Brings together work done in other Edge-related groups in an framework focused on implementation
What sort of contributions has your team made to the community, ecosystem through LF Edge participation?
We have primarily participated in the development of Akraino Blueprints such as the Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Blueprint Family. Specifcially, the KNI Provider Access Edge Blueprint, which leverages the best-practices and tools from the Kubernetes community to declaratively manage edge computing stacks at scale and with a consistent, uniform user experience from the infrastructure up to the services and from developer environments to production environments on bare metal or on public cloud, and the KNI Industrial Edge Blueprint. We are also active on the LF Edge Governing Board and other committees that help form and guide the project.
What do you think sets LF Edge apart from other industry alliances?
Close interaction with LF Networking and CNCF communities.
How will LF Edge help your business?
Red Hat’s partners and customers are strongly heading towards areas in RAN and other workload virtualization and containerization, 4g/5g, Edge, MEC and other variations on those areas. The Linux Foundation Edge’s umbrella is one of the premier places for organizations focusing on creating open source solutions in these areas to converge.
What advice would you give to someone considering joining LF Edge?
As with any open source engagement, prospective members should have clear, concrete and well-documented objectives they wish to achieve as a result of their engagement. These may include elaboration of specific technical capabilities, having a structured engagement strategy with certain key partners, or exploration of a new approach to emerging challenges. Take advantage of onboarding support provided by LF staff and senior contributors in your projects of interest.
To find out more about LF Edge members or how to join, click here.
To learn more about Akraino, click here. Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #akraino, #akraino-help, #akraino-tsc and #akraino-blueprints channels.
