DevOps Articles

Critical Factors for Managing Applications and Kubernetes at the Edge

Autonomous vehicles, remote asset monitoring, in-hospital patient monitoring, and real-time defect detection in factories are just a few examples of business applications that leverage the responsive performance, scalability, and reduced latency found at the network edge.

While these two factors are somewhat independent, together they increase the demand for applications on the edge by orders of magnitude.

With these limitations and challenges in mind, there are several Kubernetes management considerations that are important when operating at the edge to ensure your applications are indeed cutting-edge and not bleeding-edge: The edge is often thought of as being a “serverless” computing environment, but that belief doesn’t reflect reality. What makes the edge effective is that it moves the servers and applications closer to the place where the need exists.

With that efficiency comes a much higher level of management overhead given the number of containers and clusters that need to be managed.