Now in Early Access: Enhancing Edge Resiliency with Node Clustering
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape edge deployments are increasingly handling critical business functions, demanding architectures that balance agility, scalability, and resiliency in geographically distributed and often harsh environments.
In this update we’ll be discussing edge node clustering, ZEDEDA’s latest innovation in early access that introduces high availability functionality to the edge and greatly expands resiliency for edge deployments.
Delivering High Availability and Resiliency to the Edge: Edge Node Clustering
Edge node clustering introduces the ability to cluster 3 EVE nodes, creating a highly resilient architecture that goes beyond traditional protections against disk failures. While our existing support for RAID and ZFS ensures robust disk-level data integrity, edge node clustering leverages clustered storage to extend this protection to cover node-level failures. This ensures your edge applications remain operational, maintaining business continuity, even in the face of unexpected hardware disruptions or node loss.
How It Works:
- Clustered Storage: Data availability is ensured across all nodes in the cluster, leveraging clustered storage to maintain integrity and uptime.
- Load Sharing and Automatic Failover: Applications are intelligently distributed across nodes, with automatic failover ensuring uninterrupted operations in the event of a node failure.
- Seamless Recovery: Once a failed node is recovered or replaced, applications and data are automatically restored and rebalanced across the cluster, minimizing downtime and reducing the need for manual intervention.
Edge node clustering is powered by a new EVE variant that integrates clustered storage and a robust cluster control plane. This architecture ensures that the cluster operates cohesively, delivering the high availability and reliability businesses demand for mission-critical edge deployments without manual setup or intervention.
To learn more and see edge node clustering in action, join us on February 27 at 9 am PST for a live webinar.
Simplified Cluster Management with New UI Enhancements
To make edge node clustering easy to manage, we’ve introduced the following updates to the ZEDEDA user interface:
- New Top-Level Menu: A dedicated “Edge Node Clusters” menu supports simple cluster setup and management.
- Cluster Deployment Toggles: Various screens, including applications, network instances, and volumes, now feature toggles to enable deployment on a cluster instance, offering seamless integration into your workflows.
To Cluster or Not to Cluster? That is an “Edgy” Question.
When deploying workloads at the edge, one key architectural decision is whether to run them on a single node or a cluster of edge nodes. Not all workloads demand high availability or the level of resiliency that clustering provides. To weigh the tradeoffs of adding edge node clustering to your environment, consider these factors:
| Single edge node | Clustered edge nodes |
| Prioritizes simplicity, cost, and efficiency | Prioritizes high availability, redundancy, and data protection |
| Requires minimal hardware, ideal for space and power constrained environments | Requires space and power for three nodes |
| Workloads are tolerant to data loss in a complete node failure | Workloads must always be available, if a single node failure would disrupt business operations, clustering insures business continuity |
| Lower costs are a priority, minimizes upfront investment | Data integrity is critical, applications requiring continuous logging, analytics, or transaction processing benefit from clustering to prevent data loss |
Join the Early Access Program (EAP)
Edge node clustering is currently available for early access; please sign up for ZEDEDA’s Early Access Program to test edge node clustering and provide feedback to the ZEDEDA product team.
Conclusion
For companies depending on critical business functions at the edge, resiliency is not just a feature—it’s a necessity. Edge node clustering addresses key pain points in managing distributed edge environments by:
- Reducing the risk of application downtime and data loss.
- Streamlining operational management with automated recovery and rebalancing.
- Enabling architectures that scale without sacrificing reliability.
This blog covered the latest addition of edge node clustering to the ZEDEDA edge computing platform. To see the full update of release notes, please refer to ZEDEDA’s documentation. For information on the required prerequisites and how to set up an edge node cluster, please refer to the ZEDEDA help center page: Create an Edge Node Cluster.
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