Red Hat this week made available a technology preview of a platform for centrally managing edge computing deployments at scale.
Announced at the Red Hat Summit, the Red Hat Edge Manager is designed to provide a single pane of glass that can be deployed in the cloud or an on-premises IT environment to manage heterogeneous edge computing environments.
Francis Chow, vice president and general manager for the Edge Business Unit at Red Hat, said the goal is to make it simpler to onboard, configure, update, troubleshoot and monitor edge computing platforms in real time using customizable OpenTelemetry agent software to enforce policies and collect metrics that can be centrally managed.
It’s not clear how many edge computing platforms IT organizations are managing, but more data than ever is being processed and analyzed at the point where it is being created and consumed.
The primary challenge organizations face today when managing these devices is a lack of skills, says Chow. The Red Hat Edge Manager will make it possible for a relatively small team of IT professionals to more easily manage at scale thousands of edge computing platforms at a lower total cost, he added. Many of those platforms are based on a wide range of classes of processors that today are typically managed in isolation from each other, noted Chow.
In addition to edge computing platforms, Red Hat Edge Manager will also be able to manage container workloads running on Kubernetes clusters.
Additionally, IT teams will be able to centrally manage mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) to authenticate service communication in a way that prevents impersonation or duplication of device identities.
Edge computing applications involving everything from retail point-of-sale systems to industrial machinery on factory floors are not only proliferating; they will also soon include artificial intelligence (AI) models that, in many instances, will need to process massive amounts of data in real time. As these application environments become more complex, the need for a centralized approach to managing centralized IT environments is only going to become all the more pressing.
The issue that many organizations will need to resolve will be determining to what degree these applications will be managed by an operational technology (OT) team that typically operates within a specific business unit or a centralized IT operations team.
Regardless of approach, the one certain thing is that at the current rate of development, it might not be too long before more workloads are running across a fleet of edge computing platforms than there are today in the cloud or a traditional data center. As the volume of these applications continues to increase, the greater the need to lower the total cost of edge computing becomes.
The goal, therefore, is to find a way to deploy applications across an increasingly distributed IT environment that, paradoxically, can be centrally managed at scale. Otherwise, outside of a handful of the largest enterprises, the total cost of edge computing will soon reach a level that is simply unsustainable.
