Today, ZEDEDA, the leader in edge infrastructure orchestration, announced ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, an industry-first, fully managed Kubernetes service for the distributed edge.
In just over a decade, with the ever-evolving edge as a backdrop, organizations have gone from using a virtual machine as their application form factor to containerizing just about everything, and with good reason. Containerization offers several advantages, not the least of which are ease of development and ease of deployment. As the frontrunner of containerization technology, Kubernetes has already helped countless organizations successfully run and manage the full lifecycle of their containers in a variety of environments. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation estimates that more than 5.6 million developers are using Kubernetes today, and its recent survey revealed that 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes—a substantial increase from 83% in 2020 and 78% in 2019.
Kubernetes technology has not only become the de facto container orchestration system for deploying and scaling applications in cloud and centralized data center environments, it has also spawned the evolution and adoption of containers at the edge.
Whether your organization is just venturing into edge computing or looking to manage one or more edge applications, you’re likely evaluating Kubernetes through one of two lenses:
- You’ve recently invested a lot of resources and capital into developing Kubernetes in cloud or data center environments and you’re now looking to capitalize on those investments by applying them to the edge.
- You’ve already deployed Kubernetes in the cloud or a data center, but you’re just starting out at the edge and realize you need to safeguard legacy workloads and modernize your assets, hardware, and applications, while closely investigating the potential for any risks at the edge.
Regardless of your edge deployment objective, you’ll first want to address the inherent challenges of the edge before devising a plan to implement Kubernetes. These challenges include everything from hardware and operating system diversity, network connectivity, and safety and security to diverse and remote environments and a lack of skilled resources in the field. Once these challenges are adequately resolved, you can plan for the deployment of a long-term Kubernetes edge solution.
But where do you even start?
While going it alone and/or tapping existing in-house resources to address these challenges is tempting, you’ll ultimately save time and costs, avoid resource strain, and carve out a faster path to ROI by working with an experienced edge orchestration and management provider like ZEDEDA. ZEDEDA has years of experience managing edge infrastructure projects for leading manufacturing, energy, retail, and automotive companies, and is uniquely positioned to help you tackle common and complex challenges at the edge, as well as help you face Kubernetes edge deployments head-on. That’s why, today, we’re introducing ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, the industry’s first Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering for the distributed edge.
What is ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service?
Built on ZEDEDA’s market-leading edge orchestration technology, ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a first-of-its-kind, fully managed, full lifecycle service that enables Kubernetes at the distributed edge while reducing the cost of managing and orchestrating distributed edge infrastructure and applications and increasing visibility, security, and control. The service includes a curated Kubernetes runtime that is managed and supported by ZEDEDA, as well as integrations with industry-leading orchestrators, including SUSE Rancher, VMware Tanzu, Red Hat OpenShift, Rafay, and Avassa.
ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service simplifies Kubernetes deployment and management
ZEDEDA’s new service makes it easy for customers to deploy and manage Kubernetes at the edge regardless of their specific needs, and without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, legacy system integrations, or security. With ZEDEDA, customers can focus on their applications and business outcomes, and ZEDEDA will take care of the rest. Here are a few more features of ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes service:
Managed Kubernetes runtime — This service takes care of all the complexity of deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters at the edge, such as provisioning the infrastructure, configuring the runtime, and applying security patches. This frees up customers to focus on their applications and business outcomes.
Kubernetes in air-gapped environments — Many edge deployments are air-gapped, meaning they have no connectivity to the cloud. ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service enables customers to run Kubernetes in these environments by bringing Kubernetes orchestrators into air-gapped environments.
Kubernetes API for ZEDEDA — This upcoming feature is for customers who already have a cloud-based Kubernetes infrastructure and may want to run a few containers at multiple remote locations but are not currently in need of a full Kubernetes infrastructure at the edge. The Kubernetes API enables customers to use their existing infrastructure to interact with ZEDEDA and run containers on the edge.
Why ZEDEDA’s Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering is a good choice
There are a number of benefits to using ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, including:
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- Reduced complexity: ZEDEDA takes care of all the complexity of deploying and managing Kubernetes containers at the edge, thereby freeing customers to focus on their applications and business outcomes.
- Improved security: ZEDEDA’s managed Kubernetes runtime is built on a secure foundation, with zero-trust security and air-gapped support. These features help to protect edge computing deployments from cyberattacks and other threats.
- Increased scalability: Unlike the ease of managing one to three one-thousand-node clusters in the cloud, managing thousands of one- to three-node clusters at the edge can be quite challenging. ZEDEDA’s fleet management capabilities make it easy to deploy and manage Kubernetes containers at the edge at scale, enabling customers to quickly and easily scale their edge computing solutions up or down as needed.
- Flexibility: ZEDEDA’s Kubernetes API enables customers to use their existing legacy infrastructure to interact with ZEDEDA and run containers on the edge. This gives customers the flexibility to use the tools and processes they are already familiar with while making plans for future modernization.
- Orchestrator Integrations: ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is supported by integrations with industry-leading orchestrators, which provides a more robust solution for deploying Kubernetes at the modern, distributed edge.
- Support from ZEDEDA: While ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes service can be self-managed, customers who need setup assistance or lifecycle support, including everything from cluster runtime updates to security patching can visit help.ZEDEDA.com to reach ZEDEDA’s technical support staff.
Why ZEDEDA…and why now?
Installing and managing a variety of technologies at the edge requires highly skilled workers, but building applications at the edge doesn’t just happen in one place. Rather, it happens at hundreds to thousands of connected sites with no real centralized connectivity. While many organizations have evaluated the resources and skillsets required to manage applications at numerous distributed sites, many more have realized that doing so would undoubtedly fail as a long-term strategy. ZEDEDA’s centralized management and orchestration solution, built to overcome known edge-related challenges, and now a new edge Kubernetes service are both well-equipped to solve this problem and more.
If, like many organizations, you’re ready for a gradual, foolproof solution in which you can still make use of your legacy applications while slowly transitioning into containers, ZEDEDA’s Kubernetes-as-a-Service solution is a wise choice, as it ensures legacy applications and containers can run at the same time and transition exclusively to containers over a period of time. This gradual, controlled, and predictable approach ensures you don’t experience a negative revenue impact nor have to take any unnecessary development risks.
The proven capabilities of ZEDEDA’s edge infrastructure orchestration and management solution, as well as the success of numerous Fortune 500 customer projects leveraging ZEDEDA’s solution portfolio have paved the way for even more organizations to containerize their asset workloads and deploy them to the edge at scale. While there is still more work to do to spread the word, organizations are now realizing success with Kubernetes at the edge, while managing legacy workloads, even when it means containerizing these workloads one step at a time.
ZEDEDA’s Edge Kubernetes Service is a viable solution companies can use to re-architect their workloads and plan for modernization in the near or long term. This growth and evolution in the edge computing industry has been a long time coming, but the team at ZEDEDA is committed to helping its customers succeed.
