Driving Industry 4.0 at Distributed Edges with Cloud Orchestration
Fig . 5 - High Availability for Edge Computing ( left : single edge node configuration ; right : high-availability edge node configuration ).
Transitioning to a Kubernetes-based platform allows to bring enterprise-grade applications to the edge in an easier and consistent manner . In addition , the existing edge computing modules are now evolved to be containers that are staged to be scaled horizontally to address increased utilization ( see Figure 5 ). Additionally , Kubernetes provides a runtime that is open for setting up architecture ’ s components such as backing services including databases and message brokers into High Availability ( HA ) configurations . This enables an edge architecture that can both scale elastically and provide stateful and stateless service redundancy to optimize response time and minimize downtime .
Edge Lifecycle Management Service and Orchestration
Often , the global nature of plant distribution can make managing and orchestrating edge nodes complicated and costly . Thus , it is necessary that modern edge computing architectures include functionalities to automate the management and orchestration of edge nodes within all steps of its lifecycle . In context of edge lifecycle management , it is important to keep business applications running at the edge always maintained and updated without needing to stop any process in the manufacturing ( upgradeability ).
As shown in Figure 4 , Edge Lifecycle Management Service and Orchestration ( ELMO ) establishes standardized channel to provide lifecycle management of business applications and services from the cloud . Edge Lifecycle Management Service and Orchestration leverages de-facto standards such as Kubernetes and Helm .
- 30 - June 2021