Zededa, edge orchestration, and the car of the future

Background

In February, Zededa secured $72 million in a Series C funding round led by Smith Point Capital. Total funding to date is over $127 million. Executives reported that 12 Fortune Global 500 accounts are now in production with Zededa. 

Zededa’s edge application orchestration platform is helping address the challenges of highly distributed computing including:

• Scale, where customers are managing applications on tens of thousands of devices. 
• Connectivity — applications that need to be able to run even if the environment is disconnected from the network.
• Manageability; there are few or no onsite personnel to maintain devices.

Zededa’s offerings include EVE-OS, a bare metal virtualization engine, and Zededa Cloud, a SaaS-based controller. EVE-OS is an open-source “secure by design” operating system. Security is implemented in features such as measured boot, remote attestation and encrypted data storage, ensuring that only verified and secure workloads are executed. The platform can orchestrate containers, clusters, and VMs on a wide range of hardware. Kubernetes developers can also take advantage of a fully managed Kubernetes service from Zededa. In April, Zededa introduced Edge Sync, which enables customers to manage deployments locally as well as from the cloud. 

Customer Reference — Auto Manufacturer

One of the case studies Zededa presented was an automotive company that builds around eight million vehicles per year and services another 12 million vehicles at thousands of sites globally. According to Zededa, the customer has 70,000 dealerships and service centers around the world.

One of the hot topics in the automotive market is the “software-defined vehicle” (SDV), whose features and functions are enabled through software. Over-the-air (OTA) updates are a key capability associated with newer auto manufacturers such as Tesla, Lucid, and Rivian.

Zededa is not doing that — yet. What the customer is using Zededa for is managing software delivery to service centers; from there, technicians can install the updates in the vehicles. Why is an edge orchestration platform needed? For one, each vehicle has its own software system because vehicles contain hundreds of electronic control units (ECUs), each of which comes from a variety of suppliers. and that amounts to about 20GB of code on average. 

This brings up the next problem: managing the delivery to the service centers. Zededa’s platform enables the customer to manage the software deployment with granular control (delivering the software image on a rolling basis to different regions, for example). The software itself is divided up, with multiple container images “assembled” at the edge for final installation.  With security being paramount, the platform leverages TPM to guarantee the integrity of software and the endpoint.

What’s driving the opportunity

Cybersecurity and associated regulations are playing a part in the need for effective software delivery.  UN Regulation No. 155 (UN R155) requires automakers to verify and ensure security measures across their entire supply chain. This regulation, which became effective for all new vehicles starting in July 2024, requires manufacturers to maintain and enhance these systems as new threats emerge or vulnerabilities are discovered. Not only that, security has to be assured throughout a vehicle’s entire lifecycle.

What lies down the road

With the initial phase of the project having reached 15,000 nodes, the Kubernetes orchestration component isn’t keeping up, so Zededa says it is working to take over some of that orchestration layer scaling. As Michael Maxey, Zededa’s VP of technical business development noted, most Kubernetes orchestrators such as RedHat OpenShift and Suse Rancher were built with a centralized cloud and a couple of thousand nodes in mind. Scaling past these limits has meant sharding the K8s orchestrator, and Zededa is working to build an orchestrator that scales past what typically is supported, he said.

Future projects include:

• Consolidating other dealer infrastructure (applications for inventory management, for example).
• In-car diagnostics.
• The aforementioned OTA firmware updates. 

Conclusion

While OTA updates might be a higher-profile use case, the reality is that few manufacturers have a unified SDV platform to target, and many efforts by legacy automakers have sputtered, for lack of a better word. Zededa already has a better opportunity that will present plenty of growth — managing software delivery to dealerships, where most software updates for vehicles will take place for the foreseeable future as regulations such as UN R155 become compulsory across more markets.

Article Topics

automative  |  edge orchestration  |  edge platform  |  transportation  |  Zededa