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 | Nov 22, 2023 | Automation, Edge, Industrial Computers
The list of trade fairs that I’m missing grows. I did not go to Nuremberg this year for the SPS show. There were many product announcements. These three are from Siemens concerning its Industrial Edge. It is all happening at the Edge.
- New hardware and software available for Siemens’ Industrial Edge ecosystem
- Industrial Edge Management System now cloud-based As-a-Service
- Low code for Industrial Edge: Simplifying edge app programming with Mendix on Edge
Edge Computing allows manufacturers to capture and process data where it’s generated: at the field level in the plant. At this year’s SPS trade show in Nuremberg, the technology company Siemens is expanding its range of products and services for Industrial Edge at all levels. This will allow users to connect their information technology (IT) even better with the operational level (OT). Industrial Edge is also part of the portfolio of the Siemens Xcelerator open and flexible business platform.
Industrial Edge Management (IEM) is a software portal for managing IoT solutions consisting of hardware and software in the factory. It allows all devices, applications, and users integrated into Siemens Industrial Edge to be centrally managed. Siemens now also offers this system as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): IEM Cloud is available as a fully managed service and includes both the infrastructure and the set-up of the system. The operational system requirements and configuration costs for users are kept to a minimum. Industrial Edge devices can be integrated directly in the management system. IEM Cloud can be used to manage automation software as well as hardware from Siemens and third-party providers.
Siemens is also expanding its Industrial Edge ecosystem with more hardware: more Simatic industrial PCs (x86 processor-based) and Industrial Edge devices from the Scalance and Simatic IoT device family based on ARM processors are now available. Weidmüller is also the first third-party manufacturer in the Siemens ecosystem to offer the u-control M4000, an edge device based on this processor architecture. The ARM processor-based devices are primarily designed for less data-intensive use cases: for example, remote access and connectivity solutions like gateways. And users can now use Siemens’ new Industrial Edge Own Device software to convert their existing third-party x86 processor-based IPCs into fully functional Industrial Edge devices, centrally manage them, and thereby integrate existing hardware into their IoT environment.
Mendix’s low-code development environment allows users to develop field-level apps in production with no coding knowledge. Automation engineers can use the new Industrial Edge plugin to develop industry-specific apps in their Mendix Studio Pro development environment and seamlessly install them on appropriate devices at the field level.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 14, 2023 | Data Management, Edge, Operations Management
This is one of those conversations initiated when a PR person notices I cover a topic. The Edge is an important part of the network today. So George Westwater, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Progress, sent some notes.
[Note: Progress (formerly Chef) is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration “recipes”.]
When it comes to managing applications at the edge, organizations, including manufacturers, must consider three dimensions for optimal edge management and security: configuration, continuous compliance, and secure software supply chain. They must ensure that their solution is uniquely tailored to address the requirements of remote edge computing. This approach is critical across many industries, including automated warehouses, automotive manufacturing, retail, and restaurants becoming an integral part of their operations.
When organizations start a project, they often focus on a single dimension of the problem, such as improving application deployments, improving application security, addressing changing regulatory/compliance requirements, or increasing the security/handling of remote devices. To be truly successful though, organizations ultimately find they require a comprehensive, integrated approach to seamlessly address the management of all three dimensions of edge management. Organizations must adopt this approach to successfully adopt continuous compliance, efficient software packaging, secure delivery, and configuration drift prevention.
Edge devices are vital in modern manufacturing but are prone to security vulnerabilities and configuration inconsistencies. Organizations must adopt a robust framework for building, packaging, delivering, and running software in remote locations. This approach provides package authenticity, and runtime protection and reduces testing time. It also enforces edge device compliance by collecting and correcting configuration drift and delivers secure software updates. As a result, it effortlessly adapts to various topologies, meeting business and regulatory requirements.
As part of a single and long-established Progress DevSecOps framework that supports application infrastructure across virtually any cloud to any edge, Chef’s Edge Management allows organizations to meet configuration, continuous compliance, and secure software supply chain requirements that enhance operational reliability and security for edge device.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 13, 2023 | Automation, Edge, Process Control, Technology
Three recent items from Emerson just came my way. The essay on Emerson Process Experts about decoupling software, hardware, I/O in control systems piqued my interest as Emerson’s “response” to the Open Process Automation Forum’s work. I place response in quotation marks because I’m not sure when they really started development. I know that Honeywell, for example, began its development work even before OPAF.
Emerson also is playing at the Edge, while valves continue to be an important part of the product portfolio noted by the release of a valve-related product.
It’s Time to Break Up—Automation’s Future will be Defined by Decoupling by Todd Walden, Claudio Fayad
As Claudio Fayad explains in his recent article in Processing magazine, there are many exciting changes coming as Emerson embarks on its Boundless Automation journey and evolves the modern control system in to a next-generation automation platform. However, what might come as a surprise is that many of the coming evolutions will look familiar, as quite a bit of the important work is based in a decoupling journey—one that actually started a long time ago.
People who have been in the automation industry a long time likely still remember the days when I/O required termination on marshalling cabinets and I/O cards attached to the controller. The complicated interface meant project engineering was extremely complex—wiring diagrams needed to be created in advance of every project and though they could be changed later in the project, those changes could quickly become very costly.
To meet this need, Emerson designed an Electronic Marshalling solution. Electronic Marshalling decoupled I/O from the controller, empowering teams to define I/O on an as-needed basis and gave them the option to stay flexible even in the late stages of a project. And while that critical transformation took place decades ago, the decoupling of I/O from the control system is still relevant in one of the newest technologies that will form the foundation of the Boundless Automation journey: advanced physical layer (APL). APL brings the power and flexibility of Ethernet into the plant using the two-wire cabling that plants already have in place. As Claudio explains, using APL to further decouple I/O from the control system will bring big benefits,
Emerson’s New Edge Solution Democratizes Operational Data
Emerson has launched the DeltaV Edge Environment that expands the capabilities of the evolving DeltaV automation platform to provide an operational technology (OT) sandbox for data manipulation, analysis, organization and more. Teams can deploy and execute applications to run key artificial intelligence (AI) engines and analytics close to the data source with seamless, secure connectivity to contextualized OT data across the cloud and enterprise. The DeltaV Edge Environment empowers teams to more quickly deliver operational improvements tied to productivity, sustainability and other business objectives.
A single, encrypted, outbound-only flow of data helps authorized users ensure they have constant access to near real-time data without risk of users accessing the control system—a common risk with traditional custom-engineered solutions. Users can run applications for visualization, analytics, alarm management, digital twin simulations and other needs with the contextualized data available on the DeltaV Edge Environment. OT teams will know the rich data they use is a precise replica, always up to date and fully reflective of the current operating condition.
The DeltaV Edge Environment leverages open, common protocols such as OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) to provide contextualized data while standard application programming interfaces like representational state transfer architectural style (REST API) and scripting tools like Python provide the sandbox environment in which users can design and run applications.
Learn more on the DeltaV Edge Environment webpage.
New Valve Health App Provides Timely Plantwide Health Indicators
Emerson has announced the Plantweb Insight Valve Health Application, a powerful software tool that combines Fisher control valve expertise with advanced analytic algorithms. The new app makes it possible for users to visualize an entire connected fleet of valves, while prioritizing actions based on the health index of each valve. This helps plant personnel optimize valve repair activities, resulting in faster and better maintenance decisions, leading to reduced downtime.
The app allows users to prioritize repair and maintenance activities with five different indicators—Repair Urgency Status, Valve Health Index, Financial Impact, Criticality, and NE107 Alert Status—to meet specific needs. The app includes explanations, recommendations, and suggested time to take action. This last indicator is totally new to the market and is one of the app’s exclusive features.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 7, 2023 | Edge, Operations Management
One of my 2023 themes has built on paraphrasing Paul Simon’s At the Zoo, “They say it’s all happening at the Edge.” During my brief career as an IT Influencer, I was the “edge” guy. Just as I recently asked about the future of embedded control, I’m also curious about developments at the edge and its implications for data—as in “digital transformation.”
When Inductive Automation CEO Colby Clegg discussed coming attractions at the last Ignition Community Conference, this announcement of rationalizing the Ignition Edge product portfolio drew applause and whistles. Herewith, the new Ignition Edge lineup.
Capturing, processing, and visualizing critical data at the remote edge of the network has never been easier or more affordable. By adding the updated line of Ignition Edge products to field and OEM devices, you can extend your data collection with unlimited tag and device connections, see your data at the edge with state-of-the art visualization tools, run scripts, interface with applications, and extend your system all the way to the edge of your network with data syncing and system management.
The New Edge Product Line
The new Edge product line combines our five previous Edge products into two updated Edge products: Ignition Edge IIoT and Ignition Edge Panel. Don’t worry, the power and functionality of our old products — Edge Compute, Edge Sync Services, and Edge EAM — aren’t going anywhere. Instead, their features are being rolled into the New Edge IIoT and Edge Panel.
In addition to these changes, Ignition Edge products no longer come pre-packaged with Oil & Gas specific drivers for ROC and Totalflow. However, these drivers can be purchased separately and added onto Edge products.
Ignition Edge IIoT
Ignition Edge IIoT turns virtually any field device, such as a touch panel or a client terminal, into a lightweight, MQTT-enabled edge gateway that works seamlessly with Ignition IIoT and other common IIoT platforms, providing remote data acquisition and optional secured feedback and control. It’s ideal for polling data at the device location and publishing data to an MQTT server that business systems and applications can access.
Now includes unlimited tags and device connections for included drivers, the ability to run scripts, create REST APIs, synchronize data to a central server, and act as an EAM Agent Gateway.
Ignition Edge Panel
Ignition Edge Panel includes everything in Ignition Edge IIoT plus local visualization functionality for your HMIs. Choose between Perspective (2 sessions) or Vision (1 local client, 1 remote client) as your visualization system for Edge Panel. Build future-proof, robust local control systems that are Industry 4.0-compatible. It’s ideal for standalone HMIs and providing a local-client fallback for field HMIs if the network connection is lost.
Now includes unlimited tags and device connections for included drivers, the ability to publish MQTT data, run scripts, create REST APIs, synchronize data to a central server, and act as an EAM Agent Gateway.
