5G Edge computing is a collaboration between cloud service providers and Verizon and setting up to use the Edge Discovery Service requires you to take actions in both platforms:
- Find the regions defined in the Verizon 5G edge network, and then identify the regions where you want to deploy your application.
- Create one or more service profiles that describe the resource requirements of the application services that will be deployed at the edge.
- Use the region names and service profiles to find the optimal 5G Edge platforms to deploy to in each region. (You can, optionally, use a user equipment identifier instead of a service profile to find optimal 5G Edge platforms based on the IP address of that equipment.)
- Through your cloud service provider, deploy your application's edge services to each of the 5G Edge platforms identified in the previous step.
- Note the endpoint information for each of the deployed services; such as the FQDN, IPv4 address, IPv6 address, port and URI.
- Register the endpoints with the Edge Discovery Service. In essence, you are telling the Edge Discovery Service, "Service XYZ is deployed to platform A at endpoint 123.23.345.111, and to platform B and endpoint 345.56.567.123."
After you have completed the above steps, you can send API requests to find the optimal service endpoints for specific client devices to connect to.
Steps 1-6 can be incorporated into your deployment processes. The request to find optimal service endpoints for each client session can be incorporated into the client application, or built into a cloud-based client routing service that is called at the beginning of each session.
Tutorial
Robert Belson (of Verizon's 5G MEC blog) has put together a tutorial to get up and running with public MEC.