State of the Edge 2022: Born in the cloud, works at the edge

For many organizations, moving to the cloud is about agility: shifting from capex to opex and getting the opportunity to scale up applications when there’s demand and turn them off when there isn’t. But the changes you need to make in how you develop and deploy your solutions are inherently good practice: integrating development and operations, testing and securing code as you write and deploy it rather than once you have it running and automating the pipeline that gets it into production as well as the environment it runs in.

Devops and Gitops are key to using cloud services efficiently but treating infrastructure as code also applies to managing edge infrastructure. Delivering consistent and reliable updates to software and infrastructure configuration as quickly as possible matters on any infrastructure, but for remote sites with constrained resources, heterogeneous hardware and critical workloads, testing, validation, and automation are possibly even more important. Containers are a key part of delivering workloads at the edge, especially when they’ve been developed in the cloud (and, latency permitting, might be sent back to the cloud if usage needs to scale beyond what the edge can deliver), as are policies or feature flags that make sure workloads are placed on devices that have the right resources, whether that’s compute, storage, or sensors.

While Kubernetes (or at least the Kubernetes API) has emerged as the mainstream option for managing distributed infrastructure at cloud and datacenter scale, container orchestration is more complex at the edge

The key to unlocking cloud native on anything but scale out data center infrastructure is finding a way to abstract processes that isn't OS and architecture-specific, because at the edge those are far more heterogeneous than in the cloud, with embedded operating systems, custom images that include only the packages that are absolutely necessary and script-driven system configurations common.

This was the chapter on extending or migrating cloud workloads to the edge that I wrote (with Simon Bisson) for the State of the Edge report 2022: you can read the rest of it here:

State of the Edge Report 2022 – State of the Edge

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