Eclipse Foundation bets on EdgeOps with ioFog 2.0 release

“Edge computing is central to a number of transformative technologies such as AI, autonomous vehicles, smart manufacturing, and Industry 4.0, as well as being key to 5G adoption,” explains Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The release of ioFog 2.0 showcases the Edge Native Working Group’s ability to support community members and deliver production-ready code to the broader edge computing industry. The ioFog platform has been proven in the field, having been used in multiple real-world use cases including serving as the backbone of an Edge AI application monitoring temperatures and mask compliance among schoolchildren to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Edge computing brings compute power and storage physically closer to data and applications in order to improve performance and increase efficiency. According to Grandview Research, the edge computing market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 36.9% from 2020 to 2027 to reach USD 43.36 billion by 2027. The Eclipse Foundation hosts production-ready projects that enable developers to quickly build, deploy, and manage edge computing applications.

Eclipse ioFog 2.0

Eclipse ioFog is a commercial-grade and production-ready open source platform architected for edge computing environments. It is currently in use by major service providers and Fortune 500 enterprises. ioFog brings cloud native architectures such as Kubernetes to the edge, thus enabling developers to easily manage, orchestrate and deploy microservices to any edge device as easily as they build cloud-based infrastructure.

The core concept of the ioFog architecture is the Edge Compute Network (ECN), which consists of three primary components.

– Controller: Orchestration, lifecycle management and deployment of distributed microservice applications.

– Agents: Lightweight universal container runtime, installed on edge devices, manages lifecycle of microservices, volumes, edge resources, etc.

– Service Mesh: Facilitates communication between Controller and Agents and distributed microservice applications.

ioFog’s uniqueness is that it abstracts the complexities of networking from applications. The platform can be deployed on bare-metal, all major clouds, in VMs and onto Kubernetes as an edge native second level scheduler. At the edge, ioFog supports any device with a modern Linux kernel, seamlessly making it a part of an ECN. In addition, ioFog relies on an innovative keyless security model to secure applications and their data.

Focused on developers, ioFog provides a single tool to manage deployment, orchestration and operations across all distributed infrastructure. ioFog is a leading platform for EdgeOps, an evolution of DevOps principles and techniques focused specifically on edge computing architectures. The EdgeOps concept is defined and promoted by the Edge Native Working Group at the Eclipse Foundation.

With the release of ioFog 2.0, the major development focus has been on a robust set of features required for production-grade deployments and management of EdgeAI applications. Central to this was a collaboration with Red Hat to replace ioFog’s legacy Service Mesh with Red Hat’s Skupper project. Skupper uses the Apache Qpid Dispatch Router to implement application connectivity between datacenters and any type of edge without VPNs or special firewall rules. With Skupper, application connections can be established using a simple yaml configuration file.

Additionally, ioFog 2.0 brings fluidity to EdgeOps, with the ability to add, remove and move Agents between ECNs at runtime, live orchestration, migration and draining of microservices and applications. Further production EdgeOps features have also been added to the ioFog, such as policy-driven image pruning, multiple image registry management and dynamic agent volumes.

Article Topics

DevOps  |  Eclipse Foundation  |  edge applications  |  edge cloud  |  industry standards