Red Hat, Inc. introduced
Red Hat Device Edge,
a solution for flexibly deploying traditional or containerized
workloads on small devices such as robots, IoT gateways, points of sale,
public transport and more. Red Hat Device Edge delivers an
enterprise-ready and supported distribution of the Red Hat-led open
source community project
MicroShift,
a lightweight Kubernetes orchestration solution built from the edge
capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, along with an edge-optimized
operating system built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This latest
product in the Red Hat edge portfolio aims to provide a future-proof
platform that allows organizations' architecture to evolve as their
workload strategy changes.
As more and more companies deploy edge computing across a broader range
of use cases, many new questions, operational needs and business
challenges are poised to arise. In industries like automotive,
manufacturing and more, organizations are up against different
environmental, security and operational challenges that require an
ability to work with small form-factor edge devices in these resource
constrained environments. Ultimately, different devices have different
requirements in terms of computing power, software compatibility and
security footprint.
With Red Hat Device Edge, organizations can have the flexibility to
deploy containers at the edge in a small footprint, reducing compute
requirements by up to 50% in comparison to traditional Kubernetes edge
configurations. It also helps to address many of the emerging questions
around large-scale edge computing at the device edge by incorporating:
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Kubernetes built for edge deployments, enabling IT teams to use
familiar Kubernetes features in a new, smaller, lighter-weight footprint
offered by MicroShift. This lowers the barrier of entry for teams
building cloud-native applications for edge computing environments and
enables them to use existing Kubernetes skills to achieve greater
consistency of operations across the entirety of the hybrid cloud, from
the datacenter to public clouds to the edge.
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An edge-optimized Linux OS built from the world's leading enterprise Linux platform in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and tailored
for small edge devices with intelligent updates that use minimum
bandwidth. This helps organizations tackle the challenges of
intermittent connectivity while mitigating the impact on edge
innovation.
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Capabilities for centrally scaling and monitoring edge device fleets
with Red Hat Smart Management. IT teams can use zero-touch
provisioning, system health visibility and updates with automatic
rollbacks to maintain a stronger edge management and application
security posture.
Red Hat Device Edge for far-flung, resource constrained use cases across different industries
Red Hat Device Edge was created to help Red Hat customers and partners
tackle their most challenging edge environments. For example, Lockheed Martin has been collaborating with Red Hat
in the MicroShift project community and is also working to deploy Red
Hat Device Edge to modernize and standardize its application delivery
and AI workloads in extreme conditions including wildland fire
management, contested military environments and space. Additionally, ABB
is planning to use Red Hat Device Edge for ABB AbilityTM EdgeniusTM on
resource constrained devices. Edgenius is a comprehensive edge platform
for industrial software applications.
Red Hat Device Edge will be aimed at organizations who require small
factor edge devices with support for bare metal, virtualized or
containerized applications, regardless of industry. Additional use cases
include but are not limited to:
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Miniature, connected nodes on public transportation where edge
devices are often in motion but still need faster processing via AI/ML
to analyze data locally in real time (i.e. railways, mining, cars,
drones).
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Resilient resource nodes at challenging locations like weather
monitoring stations where, in spite of the harsh, tough-to-support
environments, an edge device will still be capable of taking care of
itself with the ability to perform automated software rollbacks,
maintain a stronger security posture and better enforce sensitive data
controls.
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Emerging edge constrained scenarios where thousands of edge
devices may be running applications in locations that make weight,
temperature and connectivity all major concerns.
Red Hat Device Edge meets organizations wherever they are today in their
edge computing journey, as it will run a wide variety of workloads
using Podman
for edge container management or MicroShift for a Kubernetes API.
Customers will even be able to use legacy windows applications within a
virtual machine.
Availability
Red Hat Device Edge is planned as a developer preview early next year,
and expected to be generally available with full support later in 2023.