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.”
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.
