OpenYurt Deep Interpretation｜Turn on the cloud-native management capabilities of edge devices

About Beijing time September 27th, OpenYurt released the v0.5.0 version. In the newly released version, the kubernetes-native non-intrusive and extensible edge device management standard is proposed for the first time, which seamlessly integrates the Kubernetes business load model and the IOT device management model.

Author | Jia Yixing (VMware), He

On September 27th, Beijing time, OpenYurt released the v0.5.0 version. In the newly released version, the kubernetes-native non-intrusive and extensible edge device management standard is proposed for the first time, which seamlessly integrates the Kubernetes business load model and the IOT device management model. At the same time, it cooperated with VMware to promote EdgeX Foundry as the first implementation of the cloud-native device management model and successfully implemented it, which greatly reduces the complexity of EdgeX Foundry's deployment and management on Kubernetes and also improves the management efficiency of edge devices.

What kind of edge device management capabilities does the cloud native ecosystem need?

When using Kubernetes to solve the needs of edge computing scenarios, existing solutions either change the system architecture (such as packaging the control plane and kubelet together), or heavily modify the core components (such as kubelet integrated device management).

Inspired by the Unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well" (Do one thing and do it well), the OpenYurt community believes that Kubernetes should focus on the management of computing resources and business containers, while edge device management can be achieved by adopting existing Edge computing platform to complete.

Therefore, the OpenYurt community defines generic Kubernetes CRDs, which act as an intermediary between OpenYurt and edge platforms. By implementing custom controllers for these CRDs, any existing edge platform (such as EdgeX Foundry) can be integrated into OpenYurt. At the same time, these CRDs allow users to manage edge devices in a declarative manner, which provides users with a Kubernetes-native edge device management experience.

Therefore, the cloud native management characteristics of edge devices can be summarized as follows: Kubernetes-native management, non-intrusive mode integration, and no edge computing platform binding.

Kubernetes-native way to manage edge devices

The cloud native management capabilities of edge devices mainly include the following points:

• Seamless integration of Kubernetes business load model and edge device management model;
• Manage edge devices in Kubernetes-native mode;
• EdgeX Foundry, as the first integrated IoT solution in the OpenYurt community, jointly explored an open standard IoT and cloud native integration solution;

First introduce the yurt-edgex-manager component, which is mainly used to manage the life cycle of EdgeX Foundry (including installation, deployment, deletion, and update) from the node pool dimension in the OpenYurt cluster. Users can easily manage the EdgeX Foundry system by simply editing the EdgeX CRD. It is recommended to deploy the EdgeX Foundry system with the node pool as the dimension. The principle is as follows:

Secondly, the yurt-device-controller component is introduced, which is a connector between the Kubernetes system and edge computing platforms (such as EdgeX Foundry), allowing users to manage edge devices through Kubernetes CRs. A yurt-device-controller instance corresponds to the EdgeX Foundry of a node pool. The overall deployment architecture is as follows:

Summarize

The integration of OpenYurt and EdgeX Foundry is completely based on the gradual discussion and implementation of the operating mechanism of the open source community. It is led by VMware, Alibaba Cloud and other companies, and the community members fully participate in the discussion. During the implementation of the entire project, the OpenYurt community's open source governance process and mechanism have been further improved, and the upstream and downstream ecological collaboration in the field of edge computing has been better promoted.

The concurrent design and development of multiple projects allows everyone to better experience the advantages of design concepts such as'Kubernetes-native, non-intrusive, and scalable', and also provides a basic guarantee for the implementation and subsequent evolution of cloud native management capabilities of edge devices .

At present, many community members are trying out this ability, and the OpenYurt community is also launching demo videos of related capabilities. Interested students or companies are welcome to follow or submit suggestions.

future plan

The new version of OpenYurt focuses on improving the native Kubernetes device management capabilities in edge scenarios, while also optimizing and improving the governance capabilities of edge scenarios. In the future, the OpenYurt community will continue to invest in edge device management, project ease of use, and unitized governance capabilities. , Thanks again to VMware, Intel, Zhejiang University, Telecom Tianyi Cloud, Ideal Auto, IBM, Alibaba Cloud for your participation. At the same time, interested students are also very welcome to join and participate in the joint construction, and jointly create a stable and reliable fully cloud-native Edge computing platform.

For more community details, please pay attention:

https://github.com/openyurtio/openyurt and https://openyurt.io/

related links

• yurt-edgex-manager：

https://github.com/openyurtio/yurt-edgex-manager

• yurt-device-controller

https://github.com/openyurtio/yurt-device-controller

• OpenYurt official website:

https://openyurt.io/en-us/

• EdgeX Foundry official website:

https://www.edgexfoundry.org

the link to check the github homepage of the OpenYurt project! !

https://github.com/openyurtio/openyurt

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