As an authorized Red Hat IT training company, we continue to share information and tips on Red Hat trainings and exams with our participants and now we are here with Ishu Verma’s ‘’No more illusions of infinite capacity” article . Ishu Verma explains Edge Computing's requirements and differences from central computing.
But first, let's talk a little bit about Edge Computing!
Edge Computing is a distributed computing framework for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. With Edge Computing, you can gain faster insights and benefit from better bandwidth and improved response times. Edge Computing, which is among the emerging technologies in 2021, took its place among the trend technologies in 2022 as well! So what makes Edge Computing so popular?
With the rapid increase in the use of Internet of Things IoT technologies and the resulting computing power, data volumes have increased tremendously. And with the spread of 5G technology, data volumes will continue to increase much more. Sending all the generated data to a central data system or cloud causes problems such as latency. Edge Computing comes to the rescue at this point. With the Edge Computing technology, data is processed and analyzed closer to where it was created. Latency is avoided as the data does not need to be transferred to the cloud or another data system for processing. With Edge Computing, which provides much faster data analysis, you can get faster insights and a better customer experience by avoiding latency.
Now let's take a look at Red Hat Senior Edge Computing Technical Marketing Manager Ishu Verma's article “No more illusions of infinite capacity” in which he explains the requirements of Edge Computing!
‘’No more illusions of infinite capacity!
In the last post, we looked at how Edge Computing (EC) differs from centralized computing and why businesses are adopting EC. Projected growth of EC in next several years means an ever growing number of businesses may be adding EC to their IT infrastructure.
New thinking needed for edge
EC brings the flexibility and simplicity of cloud computing to sites distributed across a large number of locations. Unlike traditional cloud computing with a few large sites, EC is spread across many small sites. EC solutions are as varied as the range of edge use cases, with deployments spanning from a few computing clusters to millions of edge devices. EC infrastructure could include any combination of edge devices, edge gateways, edge servers, mini-cluster or micro-datacenter.
While cloud computing infrastructure is hardware-centric and rather rigid, EC infrastructure is software defined and flexible. There are two areas where EC differs significantly from cloud computing in terms of technology and operations:
1) The "illusion of infinite capacity," where supply leads demand and users can request more resources on demand, does not hold true for Edge deployments where capacity is provisioned for a smaller set of workload. This means careful resource planning and management are needed.
2) EC will require not only providing a compute platform but also managing the whole hardware and software stack—from firmware, hardware, software and up to the services, in a consistent and repeatable manner.
When planning for EC, it’s important to consider how it affects different stakeholders. Let’s look at some of key requirements from perspective of business, operations and developer:
Business
- Resiliency: When dealing with critical business functions, edge deployments need to be highly resilient to failure. These edge systems need to continue to operate, even if it's at reduced capabilities e.g. operating in offline mode in case of network disruption.
- Hardware: With advancement in processor capabilities, it's becoming possible to run complex, compute intensive workloads at edge e.g. AI/ML on edge systems. New hardware form factors will be needed to address a broad range of edge computing requirements. These systems could include a combination of general purposes processors, GPUs, FPGAs and application specific processors.
- Security: Edge sites often have lesser physical access security which raises the risk of malicious or accidental disruption. In addition, bringing less capable devices (e.g. industrial microcontrollers, actuators) online without adequate protection is a recipe for disaster. Edge systems act as firewall and protect the entire downstream infrastructure from physical or virtual attacks. The edge systems need to be hardened from ground up—from firmware to OS to memory subsystem to storage to communication channels.
- Non-technical: Remote sites may lack technical expertise, hence, any on-site maintenance will be performed by workers lacking IT skills. The operation and maintenance of edge infrastructure needs to be simple enough to be performed by non-technical on-site workers.
- Environment: Remote locations have challenges with reliable power, space, cooling and connectivity e.g. oil rigs, mines. Edge systems need to be designed with these environmental challenges in mind.
- Cost: Due to the potential for massive scale, EC is highly cost-sensitive. In small edge deployments, fixed cost and overhead per-site do not amortize as they do in centralized computing. As the number of edge sites increase, even a small change in cost, recurring across hundreds of thousands of sites, could have a big impact on the budget.
Operations
- Remote: A business might have tens of thousands of edge sites that need to be deployed, patched, upgraded or migrated via remote operations from a central location. This requires advanced capabilities to manage these sites remotely.
- Deterministic: All site management operations have to be highly reproducible, otherwise, troubleshooting can become a huge issue at scale. EC configurations need to be highly deterministic with divergences detected and documented centrally.
- Automation: Site management operations need to be managed remotely from a centralized location, with a small number of experts. This requires a fully automated operational capability with minimal to no manual intervention.
- Reporting: For central management to be possible, central logging and reporting is a key requirement for EC solution.
- Skillset: Developers should be able to create and deploy applications, irrespective of location. This means, no special development skills should be needed to create edge applications.
- APIs: EC enables businesses to offer new classes of services based on location data. This real time location data may also need to made available to partners. Well-defined and open APIs enable the partner ecosystem to exchange data and provide value added services. APIs also allow data can be accessed in the programmatic manner, e.g. front-end developers can access IoT device data without worrying about the hardware interfaces or device drivers.
- Application Management: Edge and cloud native apps have similarities in how these apps are developed, installed, configured and shared across various teams.
Conclusion
EC needs to bring the flexibility and simplicity of cloud computing to the edge. Yet, EC differs significantly from cloud computing as the idea of "supposedly" infinite resources does not hold true for Edge deployments This means careful resource planning and management are needed. An edge computing platform needs to manage the whole hardware and software stack—from firmware, hardware, software and up to the services, in a consistent and repeatable manner.
When planning for EC, requirements from perspective different stakeholders should be considered. These requirements include business requirements like resilience, hardware form factors, security, lack of technical skills, adverse environment, cost sensitivity and flexibility of open source based solution. Operational considerations include, remote capabilities, deterministic configuration, automation and reporting. For developers, factors like no special skills for edge applications, use of APIs and flexible application management solution, should be considered.
Although, EC mass deployments remain a few years away, the design and tooling decisions made today, will have a lasting impact on future capabilities. Instead of adopting monolithic cloud to edge solutions, companies should be looking at how to leverage their existing tools to manage edge deployments. For example, consider using tooling used to manage, provision, and configure hybrid cloud for edge systems as well. This approach provides a consistent approach for managing all the systems, including edge systems.’’
Ishu Verma. ‘’No more illusions of infinite capacity”. March 3, 2020
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