Developer Guide#

Edge Orchestrator, part of the Open Edge Platform, brings the ease of cloud-native deployment, orchestration, and management to edge environments, at scale.

High-Level Architecture of Open Edge Platform |software_prod_name|

Cloud computing abstracts away details of the underlying computing devices. In contrast, edge networks often require heterogeneous and specific hosts. You may need purpose-built equipment for networking, retail, or factory control in your edge. Alternatively, you may need to run AI models that have been optimized for performance on a specific class of devices.

Additionally, hosts in an edge network may also have limited memory or compute power. They may be situated in remote environments that are hard to reach or in locations with physical security concerns. Edge Orchestrator addresses the challenges of edge computing, streamlining the management of edge networks at scale.

Edge Orchestrator consists of seven main components, deployable on-premises or in the cloud:

  • Edge Node Agents: A set of agents that run on the edge nodes as OS level agents. They communicate with the services running in the Edge Orchestrator and provide a consistent interface for the edge node software. Read more about Edge Node Agents.

  • Edge Infrastructure Manager: Policy based secure life cycle management of a fleet of edge nodes/devices at scale, spread across distributed locations allowing onboarding, provisioning, inventory management, upgrades and more. Read more about Edge Infrastructure Manager.

  • Edge Cluster Orchestrator: A lightweight multi-cluster orchestrator based on the Cluster API (CAPI) standard designed to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of Kubernetes* clusters at scale across distributed edges, providing centralized monitoring and access control. Read more about Edge Cluster Orchestrator.

  • Edge Application Orchestrator: Offers customers the ability to easily package, deploy and monitor cloud-native applications at scale across distributed edges. Read more about Edge Application Orchestrator.

  • User Interface: The web user interface for the Edge Orchestrator, allowing the user to manage most of the features of the product in an intuitive, visual, manner without having to trigger a series of APIs individually.

  • Observability: A modular observability stack that provides visibility into the health and performance of the system, including logging, reporting, alerts, and SRE data from Edge Orchestrator components and Edge Nodes. Read more about Observability.

  • Platform Services: A collection of services that support the deployment and management of the Edge Orchestrator, including Identity and Access management, multitenancy management, ingress route configuration, secrets and certificate management, cloud and on-prem infrastructure life-cycle management and more. Read more about Platform Services.

All of the components are exposed via a seamless, consistent, intuitive, and delightful user experience.

Edge Orchestrator also includes software that gets installed into the Edge Node called Edge Node Agents.

All of the artifacts needed to deploy Edge Orchestrator and the Edge Nodes are published in the Release Service.

This guide also includes an application developer guide to help you create Helm*-based applications compatible with Edge Orchestrator.