LF Edge Community Lab, Enabling Developers and Testing

### Overview At ONE Summit, Lincoln Lavoie, Principal Engineer at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) and chair of the LF Edge Community Lab TAC subcommittee, presented an overview and demonstration of the LF Edge Community Lab. Hosted at UNH-IOL, the community lab provides open-source developers working on LF Edge projects with free access to bare-metal hardware and networking resources necessary for development, blueprint validation, and collaborative testing.

### Governance and Usage Policies Originally originating out of the Akraino project, the lab now operates directly under the LF Edge Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) with regular bi-weekly subcommittee meetings. Key governance and operational rules include: - **Eligibility**: Any developer with a Linux Foundation login who is actively working on LF Edge projects (such as Akraino, EVE, or Eliot) can book resources. - **Acceptable Use & Funding**: Lab resources are fully funded by LF Edge and free to projects, replacing costly public cloud alternatives. Usage is strictly bound by an acceptable usage policy that restricts activity to LF Edge projects and prohibits misuse such as cryptocurrency mining. - **Booking Windows & Extensions**: To ensure fair rotation of hardware resources, portal bookings default to an initial maximum of three weeks. However, extensions or requests for custom hardware additions/purchases can be submitted to the TAC subcommittee for evaluation and budget approval.

### Technical Architecture and Hardware Capabilities The lab offers direct bare-metal server access rather than restrictive standard virtualized cloud instances: - **Architecture Diversity**: Offers both x86 and aarch64 (ARM) processor architectures, including multiple generations of chips (such as older and newer Ampere processors). - **Vendor Diversity**: Servers from various vendors—including Dell, Intel, HPE, Gigabyte, and Lenovo—allow developers to interact with different Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) interfaces. - **Edge and Specialized Devices**: Contains IoT gateways, virtual machines, and specialized edge peripheral hardware (such as FLIR cameras) to support specific edge computing scenarios. - **Network Topology**: Users access isolated bare-metal pods and jump servers via OpenVPN tunnels configured through the booking system, with full control over local server network configurations.

### Portal Workflow and Cloud-Init Automation Demo Lavoie demonstrated the booking interface and an automated onboarding feature rolling out in October: 1. **Booking Setup**: Users log in via LFID to the lab portal, select an available pod (such as an x86 demo pod), define project details, booking duration, hostnames, and base operating systems (e.g., Ubuntu Server). 2. **Collaborator Integration**: Adding collaborator email addresses automatically provisions their user accounts, deploys their SSH keys, and emails them OpenVPN credentials. 3. **Automated Provisioning via Cloud-Config**: The portal supports custom cloud-init configurations alongside system-generated network configs. In the demo, Lavoie supplied a custom cloud-init script that defined user accounts, sudo rights, diagnostic packages (vim, tcpdump), and automated commands to bootstrap the node as an upstream Kubernetes worker node. 4. **Access Verification**: Following automated backend installation (typically 10–15 minutes), Lavoie established the VPN tunnel, connected directly via SSH using pre-seeded keys, verified sudo access, and confirmed that kubelet and all required dependencies were deployed and running.

### Takeaways The LF Edge Community Lab eliminates hardware boundaries for open-source edge computing contributors by providing automated, self-service bare-metal environments. Through seamless collaboration features, cloud-init automation, and flexible TAC governance, community members can validate multi-architecture workloads and complex edge blueprints without incurring individual project infrastructure costs.