by Gary Mintchell | Nov 28, 2023 | Cloud, Edge, Operations Management, Software
Containers, specifically Kubernetes, constitute a powerful tool in the modern edge-to-cloud architecture, ZEDEDA has developed a service model for the technology.
In brief:
- ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a fully managed service including a Kubernetes runtime curated, managed and supported by ZEDEDA.
- Organizations can instantly deploy Kubernetes infrastructure at the distributed edge, securely and cost-efficiently.
- ZEDEDA’s partnerships and integrations with industry-leading orchestrators, such as Avassa, Rafay, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and VMware Tanzu, provide a robust solution for the modern edge landscape.
ZEDEDA has announced ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, a fully managed Kubernetes service for the distributed edge. The new service includes a Kubernetes runtime that is curated, managed and supported by ZEDEDA, as well as integrations with industry-leading orchestrators.
Deploying Kubernetes at the edge is challenging because it was built for centralized data centers and scale-out clouds and, therefore, not for inherently constrained and distributed edge environments. ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a fully managed service that simplifies Kubernetes deployments at the edge, allowing customers to focus on their applications instead of managing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. The new service eliminates the struggles typically associated with Kubernetes deployments at the edge, such as highly remote or distributed locations, constrained devices, unreliable security, lack of skilled IT personnel in the field and undependable network connectivity. ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service enables organizations to deploy and run Kubernetes infrastructure at the distributed edge remotely, securely and cost-efficiently.
“Our customers are industry leaders who are pushing the boundaries of innovation at the distributed edge, and working with them, we realized the need for an edge service that would remove the obstacles of deploying Kubernetes in these environments,” said Said Ouissal, ZEDEDA’s CEO and founder. “ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a first-of-its-kind fully managed edge solution that enables our customers to use any Kubernetes tools that fit their needs and provides a clear path to modernize edge infrastructure while leveraging existing IT investments.”
ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service Provides Full Lifecycle-Managed Kubernetes.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 28, 2023 | Automation, Cloud, Edge, Embedded Control
Edge compute continues to be the most talked about part of the network these days. This news concerns an application development platform for Edge and Cloud. I wish I could try out all this software like I used to many years ago. It’s all too complex and expensive today. Like everything, I don’t know if it works, but it sounds good.
Lightbend Inc., the company providing cloud native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, has announced the release of its latest version of Akka, one of the industry’s most powerful platforms for distributed computing, which incorporates a new and unique programming model that enables developers to build an application once and have it work across both Cloud and Edge environments.
“Today, applications developed for cloud native environments are generally not well-suited to the Edge and vice versa,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “This has always struck me as counter-productive, as both architectures lean heavily on one another to be successful. As the line between Cloud and Edge environments continues to blur, Akka Edge brings industry-first capabilities to enable developers to build once for the Cloud and, when ready, deploy seamlessly to the Edge.”
“Akka has been a powerful enabling technology for us to build high-performance Cloud systems for our clients,” said Jean-Philippe Le Roux, CEO of Reflek.io, an innovative company delivering Digital Twin technologies to geo-distributed companies. “We have been able to dramatically speed our time-to-production by building a single solution for both Cloud and Edge with Akka.”
Akka provides a singular programming model that eliminates the high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers the Edge has posed for development teams wanting to bridge the Edge and Cloud. Developers focus on business logic, not complicated, time-consuming tool integrations. As a result, businesses can harness, distribute, and fully utilize the vast amount of intelligent data to improve their operations, regardless of where that data is generated. Some specific capabilities of the latest version of Akka include:
- Adaptive Data Availability
- Projections over gRPC for the Edge – asynchronous, brokerless service-to-service communication
- Scalability and efficiency improvements to handle the large scale of many Edge services
- Programmatically defined low-footprint active entity migration
- Temporal, geographic, and use-based migration
- Run Efficiently In Resource Constrained Environments
- Support for more constrained environments such as running with GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions
- Support for multidimensional autoscaling and scale to near zero
- Lightweight storage, for running durable actors at the far edge
- A Single Programming Model for the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum
- Akka single programming model keeps the code, the tools, the patterns, and the communication the same, regardless if it is Cloud, Edge, or in between
- Seamless Integration – works at the Edge or in the Cluster automatically
- Empowering New Innovation
- Active/Active digital twins, and many other new use cases
- No dealing with complicated logic to handle network segregation
- Focus on business logic and flow (not on tool integrations)
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 15, 2023 | Cloud, Internet of Things, Operations Management
Some years ago Belden was searching for a greater IoT presence in a manner I felt was not strategically aligned. This acquisition makes sense even given the rather garbled marketing justifications in the news release. Although a few companies are investigating other means than Cloud, certainly having a presence in the Cloud is essential for many applications. Belden announces here the acquisition of German-based Industrial IoT (IIoT) specialist CloudRail.
With the acquisition of CloudRail, Belden continues its strategy to deliver the infrastructure that makes the digital journey simpler, more smart and secure. Belden is moving beyond connectivity – from what we make to what we make possible through a performance-driven portfolio, forward-thinking expertise and purpose-built solutions with a leadership position in the evolving IIoT sector.
I found that paragraph a little confusing. They really meant what they said here.
While Belden already had a strong portfolio of products in the areas of data acquisition, edge computing, and security, the industrial automation market also encounters a clear shift from on-premise systems to the cloud.
“CloudRail literally connects the factory to the Cloud. The founders of the company recognized this trend early and gained a unique leadership position. CloudRail complements our solution portfolio by adding sensor data ingestion capabilities to our Belden HORIZON DataOperations Platform and it fully supports the Belden Industrial EDGE strategy”, says Brian Lieser, Executive Vice President at Belden.
CloudRail offers solutions for industrial customers to connect assets to cloud platforms like AWS or Microsoft Azure.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 8, 2023 | Cloud, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
Pay-As-You-Go Solution Provides a Simpler Way to Leverage More Cloud Capabilities
Inductive Automation recently moved its flagship Ignition software to the cloud. Now it’s available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go plan.
Ignition Cloud Edition works together with the standard Ignition platform and Ignition Edge, creating a fully integrated and scalable system that connects people, processes, and programs for true digital transformation.
“Ignition Cloud Edition on Azure combines the vast power of the Ignition platform with Azure’s extensive cloud computing services. Adding this listing to Azure’s marketplace provides an additional avenue for access, bringing additional flexibility to architectures and opening up even more possibilities for innovation,” says Kevin McClusky, Chief Technology Architect, Inductive Automation.
Ignition Cloud Edition comes packaged with Ignition Core Modules: Perspective, Reporting, SQL Bridge, OPC UA, Enterprise Administration Module (EAM), Tag Historian, and Alarm Notification. It also includes the Web Development, Twilio Notification, and Voice Notification modules, as well as the MQTT Engine, MQTT Distributor, MQTT Transmission modules from Cirrus Link Solutions. A cloud connector module called the MongoDB Module is also included, and Cloud Edition users will get new cloud connector modules as they become available.
Ignition Cloud Edition’s pay-as-you-go purchasing model opens up budget options, allowing companies to use part of their operating expenditure budget allotted for cloud services instead of capital expenditures. It is important to note that Cloud Edition is not SaaS, and users are responsible for configuration, backup, and upgrades of the software. Cloud Edition is backed by TotalCare Support, which includes unlimited phone and web support, upgrade protection, discounts on training courses, and more.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 6, 2023 | Cloud, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Inductive Automation had announced a Cloud Edition for Ignition. The latest news is that Ignition Cloud Edition is now available in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This pay-as-you-go solution extends on-premises data and enterprise operations, and brings elasticity to architecture design. Ignition Cloud Edition works together with the standard Ignition platform and Ignition Edge, creating a fully integrated and scalable system that connects people, processes, and programs for true digital transformation.
“We are excited to work with AWS to bring Ignition Cloud Edition into the industrial cloud space. This new solution offers Ignition’s most popular capabilities with seamless scalability, and opens the door for true industrial hybrid cloud architectures,” says Kevin McClusky, Chief Technology Architect, Inductive Automation.
Ignition Cloud Edition comes packaged with Ignition Core Modules: Perspective, Reporting, SQL Bridge, OPC UA, Enterprise Administration Module (EAM), Tag Historian, and Alarm Notification. It also includes the Web Development, Twilio Notification, and Voice Notification modules, as well as the MQTT Engine, MQTT Distributor, MQTT Transmission modules from Cirrus Link Solutions. A cloud connector module called the MongoDB Module is also included, and Cloud Edition users will get new cloud connector modules as they become available.
Ignition Cloud Edition’s pay-as-you-go purchasing model opens up budget options, allowing companies to use part of their operating expenditure budget allotted for cloud services instead of capital expenditures. It is important to note that Cloud Edition is not SaaS, and users are responsible for configuration, backup, and upgrades of the software. Cloud Edition is backed by TotalCare Support, which includes unlimited phone and web support, upgrade protection, discounts on training courses, and more.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 30, 2023 | Cloud, Data Management, Internet of Things, Operations Management
MQTT is a fast, light-weight protocol for moving data. The origins were with an IBM application. It is now widely adopted in manufacturing and industrial applications when you don’t need the full information modeling of OPC UA. HiveMQ is a relatively new company specializing in MQTT application development. This new product from them is a starter kit for using a cloud-based MQTT solution.
HiveMQ announced HiveMQ Cloud Starter plan, a dedicated, fully-managed, self-service MQTT platform. HiveMQ Cloud allows customers to rapidly procure a production-ready MQTT platform based on hourly usage, with unlimited connections and devices.
With HiveMQ Cloud, companies can develop, test, deploy, and scale production IoT use cases without the large investment and complexity of maintaining their own infrastructure. Customers in any industry from transportation to connected products to manufacturing can get started quickly and easily for free, then scale as use cases expand and require additional features to enable security, observability, administration and data integrations.
“We are proud to be the first and only MQTT platform on the market to offer multiple plans that are not capped by the number of connections to the platform,” said Dominik Obermaier, Co-founder and CTO, HiveMQ. “We feel this will be a game changer for the adoption of MQTT from the developer to the enterprise.”
HiveMQ Cloud offers the following plans:
- Serverless: Community-supported, multi-tenant MQTT broker ideal for experimenting and learning; 100 sessions free.
- Starter: Self-service, single-tenant MQTT platform deployed in a Platform-as-a-Service environment; pay hourly as you grow.
- Professional: Everything in Starter plus access to robust support, observability, security, and integration extensions; pay hourly as you grow or choose an annual subscription.
- Enterprise: Dedicated MQTT infrastructure and custom systems integration for scaling sophisticated, enterprise-grade projects; pricing upon request.
The HiveMQ Cloud Serverless, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans address a wide range of customer needs for value-priced, cloud-based MQTT Platform-as-a-Service offerings to fit any deployment stage or budget. Any size customer from start-up to enterprise can start with the Serverless or Starter plans for pilot projects and POCs, and feel confident in their ability to scale to a comprehensive and feature-rich offering on the same platform.
