SUSE Edge upgrade targets Kubernetes and Linux at the edge

Open source and Linux platform vendor SUSE is looking to help organizations solve some of the complexity and challenges of edge computing with the company’s SUSE Edge 3.1 release, announced today. 

SUSE Edge is not a single technology but rather a set of capabilities that together enable deployment and management of an edge platform. SUSE Edge integrates SUSE Linux Micro, which is an optimized Linux distribution for smaller deployments based on the company’s flagship SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). Overall Linux management is enabled with the included SUSE Manager technology. SUSE also integrates its Kubernetes distribution RK2, as well as its Rancher Prime Kubernetes management technology. Rounding out the SUSE Edge 3.1 platform are a lifecycle controller, GitOps and onboarding capabilities.

Ease of deployment and ongoing operations is a particular focus of SUSE Edge 3.1. One new feature is stack validation, which helps to ensure successful operations.

“What we’ve realized is that in some of our critical infrastructure use cases, either government related or healthcare related, for example, they want a level of trust that the application running at that location will perform as expected,” Keith Basil, general manager of the edge business unit at SUSE told Network World. “So we’ve built a stack validation framework, so that when parts move and they get updated, we thoroughly rerun that new stack through our stack validation process to make certain claims about the performance of that core, and then that gives our customers assurance that their application will run as expected.”

Edge Image Builder provides advanced network configuration

A standout feature of this release is the Edge Image Builder, a tool that addresses the complex network configurations often encountered in edge deployments.

“The other thing we realized is that most of the cloud edge deployments are very complex in their network configuration,” Basil said. “So, you may have an edge node with two NICs, VLANs, SR-IOV, and Edge Image Builder understands how to do that.” 

A key benefit of the Edge Image Builder is that it helps with deployments that have massive scale. An organization could build out a single Kubernetes image for its edge deployments and shoot it out to 10,000 systems, for example. Once those systems boot up, they can “phone home” to the centralized Rancher service and start registering machine inventory, Basil said. Additional clusters can then be built remotely as well.

“The Edge Image Builder also includes support for the CAPI (Cluster API) standard, which helps with enterprise and telco deployments,” Basil said. “So this allows the telco operators to use whatever scripting tool that they have already today that speaks CAPI to manage all of the machines at the edge for standard of telco workloads.”

Heavy metal: Enhancing bare metal provisioning and load balancing

Kubernetes is generally focused on enabling virtualized compute resources, with containers. 

An increasingly common use case is to also use it for bare metal hardware provisioning, which is where the Metal3 (pronounced Metal Cubed) open-source project comes in. In SUSE Edge 3.1, Metal3 is being integrated with the Rancher Kubernetes management capabilities to enable remote orchestration of bare-metal deployments in the data center.

Another area of bare metal improvements is focused on network load balancing. Kubernetes has multiple mechanisms inside the software stack for load balancing already. SUSE Edge 3.1 also benefits from the MetalLB technology.

“Instead of having a virtual load balancer running inside Kubernetes, we actually bring it a little bit further down to the metal and use the machines themselves to load balance services,” Basil explained.

Future directions: Industrial IoT integration

SUSE Edge is already useful as a general edge platform. The company also has a specific edition for telco known as the Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP). It’s a subset of SUSE Edge that is optimized for the needs of telecom users.

The future direction for SUSE is to build out more vertical-specific implementations of SUSE Edge, likely starting with industrial internet of things (IoT) platforms. SUSE has already joined the Margo project, which is a Linux Foundation initiative for IoT Edge device interoperability.

“Margo’s mission is to solve industrial process automation complexities and challenges, and they, independent of us, decided that Kubernetes was going to be the infrastructure which Margo would run on,” Basil said. “So we joined, and sometime in the future, we’ll get more actively engaged in Margo and maybe have an offering in the future around the industrial edge.”

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