DevOps Articles

Microsoft Akri Brings Kubernetes to Tiny Edge ‘Leaf’ Devices

This week, Microsoft released a new open source project, Akri, that allows the use of Kubernetes on the edge by exposing leaf devices, such as the sensors, cameras, controllers, and microcontroller unit (MCU) class devices that produce data and perform actions at the edge. While projects like K3S are intended to provide fully-functional Kubernetes instances to edge devices, Akri targets even smaller devices, which are unable to run Kubernetes themselves. Instead, Akri provides an abstraction layer similar to the Container Network Interface (CNI) that simplifies the process of detecting leaf devices, communicating with them, and scheduling workloads.

To do this, you tell Akri what type of device to detect and the discovery protocol needed to do so, then Akri deploys an agent on each node that can discover that specific type of leaf device and exposes those devices to Kubernetes clusters as extended resources. Akri also groups devices according to device class and specific instance, so that you might target a whole class of devices or a specific device if needed.