Eclipse Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are collaborating on a new Kubernetes-based project. Called the Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group, the new project aims to meet the rising demand for Kubernetes in internet of things (IoT) edge deployments.
CNCF leads the development of Kubernetes, while Eclipse Foundation works to standardize on open source technologies for IoT. With the joint project, the companies will evolve Kubernetes to support IoT workloads at the edge.
“The collaboration between the Kubernetes and Eclipse IoT communities will enable the development of a truly open ecosystem for distributed IoT edge computing,” said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director.
“The complexity of orchestrating IoT systems is a problem domain that Kubernetes is a perfect fit for, and many complementary open source projects are under the Eclipse IoT umbrella, so we’re very excited to work with the CNCF to support this surge of interest around Kubernetes in IoT.”
Kubernetes has emerged as a prominent container orchestration tool to build hybrid cloud services, but companies face a common set of infrastructure challenges at the edge.
“Companies with commercial interests in IoT are facing a common set of infrastructure challenges at the edge. IoT and edge applications have many distributed components that don’t usually sit together within the same datacenter infrastructure,” said Dejan Bosanac, Engineer at Red Hat, and lead for Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group.
“There are messaging challenges, security has to be re-invented for every application and service, and there are integration and data locality issues with sidecar services.”
Also, the global spending on IoT will reach $1.2 trillion by 2022, forecasts IDC. Hence, it is important to address the challenges.
Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group is a collaboration between Eclipse IoT Working Group and its 40-member companies, 35 open source projects, and Kubernetes ecosystem. It will define terminology, identify gaps in deployment and management, and educate the market on common use cases.
While addressing the challenges, the new group will also put standard metrics in place and identify open source projects that could accelerate the deployment of IoT projects.
Dejan Bosanac added that the new group is focused on accelerating a Kubernetes stack for running cloud infrastructure and distributed components at the IoT edge.
The potential of Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group has already been tested by some of the early adopters. These adopters include the Chick-fil-A fast food joint which deployed mini datacenters at 2000 restaurants with 6000 devices at the edge running Kubernetes. It helped the company remove dependency on internet connections and support low latency requirements for business critical IoT.
Also read: Google grants $9 million cloud credit to CNCF for further development of Kubernetes
“Kubernetes is the orchestration platform of choice for building hybrid cloud services, and we see it playing a major role in future IoT and Edge deployments,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
“CNCF is proud to collaborate with the vibrant Eclipse community through the newly formed Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group to accelerate innovation and market adoption of cloud native IoT.”
