Overview
Use cases across many industries are propelling the adoption of edge computing. As edge computing solutions mature, organizations are looking for a common, horizontal, unified platform—from the core to the edge—with a consistent development and operations experience. Red Hat, along with the open-source communities and our ecosystem of partners, intends to help our customers make the most of edge computing without fear of fragmentation or lock-in.
What do you need for edge computing?
Edge computing allows you to achieve faster decision-making, resilience, and autonomy for remote sites and data sovereignty. From core datacenters and clouds to edge deployments, there are many different kinds of workloads in different locations.
Red Hat’s edge computing solutions focus on delivering a consistent application and operations experience—across your entire architecture through a common, horizontal platform. This means simplifying operations through automated provisioning, management, and orchestration. We want to help you establish a common platform that stretches computing, storage, and networking across an entire hybrid cloud. Because edge computing sites often have limited or no IT staffing, they can scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes, remote deployments, and centralized management using the same tools and processes as the centralized infrastructure. This means the difference between focusing on innovation rather than infrastructure, even for the most remote sites.
In general, comprehensive edge computing solutions need to be able to:
- Run a consistent deployment model from the core to the edge.
- Offer flexible architectural options to best meet connectivity and data management needs.
- Automate and manage infrastructure from your core data center to your remote edge sites
- Maintain software across your infrastructure, at scale
- Continue operations at remote edge sites, even with limited network connectivity
- Include a robust software platform that can scale in and out
- Secure data and infrastructure in security-challenged edge environments
How can Red Hat help?
Red Hat’s broad portfolio provides the connectivity, integration, and infrastructure as the basis for the platform, application, and developer services. These powerful building blocks enable customers to solve their most challenging use cases.
A foundation that works
It all starts with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® as our OS foundation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a large ecosystem of tools, applications, frameworks, and libraries for building and running applications on bare metal, VMs or containers, in the datacenter, cloud or at the edge. It ensures stability and deployment flexibility. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is security-focused to support strategies including zero-trust, and promotes compliance to various industry and government standards. An ImageBuilder tool can quickly generate operating system images optimized for edge workloads with additional edge management capabilities to deploy, monitor and update images on thousands of edge nodes.
Consistent, containerized enivornments
For building, deploying, and managing container-based applications across any infrastructure or cloud—including private and public datacenters, or edge locations—choose Red Hat® OpenShift®. It is an industry-leading enterprise Containers & Kubernetes application platform that comes in multiple flexible topologies and composable installations. These can be mixed, creating a custom solution for each edge location, yet with the consistency of OpenShift - and taking advantage of existing tools and processes as a natural extension of the environment.
The smallest deployments
Red Hat Device Edge is a modular platform that has a purposefully built minimal footprint combining an enterprise-ready distribution of MicroShift–a lightweight Kubernetes container orchestration solution built from the edge capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift –with an edge-optimized operating system built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, plus systemwide automation capabilities from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Through this single platform, choose the capabilities that meet your needs – you may deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux alone and later add Kubernetes orchestration using MicroShift, enable automation with Red Hat Ansible, or deploy all components at the same time, enabling a fully capable platform for small, resource-limited edge devices.
Virtual machine and high-performance computing workloads
Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift®, with distributed compute nodes, supports the most challenging virtual machine workloads, like network functions virtualization (NFV), and high-performance computing workloads. As a reliable and scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), placing your compute power closer to the data source with this consistent, centrally-managed solution brings the power of edge computing to private clouds and core data centers.
Messaging and communication
Red Hat Application Services and developer tools provide cloud-native capabilities to develop fast, lightweight, scalable edge applications with data aggregation, transformation, and connectivity to support edge architectures. The messaging and data streaming capabilities of Red Hat AMQ support different communication patterns needed for edge computing use cases. With a variety of cloud-native application runtimes and connectivity, you will have a powerful foundation for building edge-native data transport, data aggregation, and integrated edge application services.
Management
Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes Red Hat Insights and edge management features of Red Hat Satellite to provide a management platform to build compact edge OS images, deploy to multiple edge devices, and provide monitoring and updates to thousands of edge nodes from a single web portal.
Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes extends the value of Red Hat OpenShift by deploying apps, managing multiple clusters, and enforcing policies across multiple clusters—at scale. Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes enables organizations to address the needs of demanding edge workloads, like AI and ML use cases, by providing simplified management of edge sites, across the hybrid cloud, from a single point.
Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform combines the universal automation language with cloud services and certified content for automating, deploying, and operating the entire edge infrastructure—including networking at-scale—in an extremely efficient and optimized manner.
Use across industry verticals
Several industries are looking at how to bring edge computing together with new application development approaches and cloud operational models to benefit their businesses.
Modernize telecommunications operations at the edge
Telecommunications providers who use the powerful combination of 5G with edge computing offer better user experiences and support bandwidth-hungry apps through a more flexible, agile, and resilient network. By virtualizing their radio access network (RAN), they can quickly scale software-based network functions to place them at the edge. Using multi-access edge computing (MEC), service providers can enable large-scale, latency-sensitive applications for their enterprise customers.
With Red Hat technologies:
Telco customers can deploy both containerized and virtualized network functions (NFV) side-by-side on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift or OpenShift virtualization, respectively. Cloud-native workload life cycles are managed using Kubernetes operators, while legacy network infrastructure and functions are automated using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Improve manufacturing efficiency and production control
Using a combination of edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), manufacturers benefit from bringing processing power closer to data to speed the proactive discovery of potential errors at the assembly line, help improve product quality, and reduce potential downtime through predictive maintenance. Using edge computing, industrial companies can improve production by closely monitoring and controlling IoT equipment at industrial sites and taking action in real-time to avoid harm to critical infrastructure or worker safety.
Open innovation with Red Hat
Red Hat offers a powerful portfolio of technologies that extends and complements its open hybrid cloud platforms to manage and scale your hybrid cloud environments. Edge computing requires industry-wide collaboration to support its broad range of use cases. No single vendor will be able to provide a complete edge computing solution, so protecting yourself against lock-in and ensuring you can find interoperable solutions is crucial. That’s where open source comes in. Open source plays a critical role in ensuring that these solutions are created and cared for, now and in the future.
Red Hat’s edge computing solutions are fostered with open source communities in mind. This means more people developing problem-solving software—openly and transparently.
But open source—alone—doesn't guarantee innovation.
Real innovation comes from the exchange of ideas and working together to solve problems. That's what community-powered open source provides. And that’s where Red Hat Open Innovation Labs comes in. Immerse your development team in an intensive, highly focused residency to learn how to build edge computing solutions, the Red Hat way.
