Why choose Red Hat for edge computing?

Use cases across many industries are propelling the adoption of edge computing. As edge computing solutions mature, organizations are looking for a common, horizontal, unified platform—from the core to the edge—with a consistent development and operations experience​. Red Hat, along with the open source communities and our ecosystem of partners, intends to help our customers make the most of edge computing without fear of fragmentation or lock-in. We are uniquely positioned to address the needs of organizations looking to extend their infrastructure and services to the edge through our platforms, portfolio, openness, ecosystem, and record of continuous innovation.

Edge computing is an important part of an open hybrid cloud vision that allows you to achieve a consistent application and operations experience—across your entire architecture through a common, horizontal platform. We know you have many different kinds of workloads in different locations, from core datacenters and clouds to edge deployments. Our approach helps you extend to the edge so that you can provide the experience your users expect while also addressing regulatory, resilience, and cost requirements.

Red Hat’s edge computing solutions focus on making operations simpler through automated provisioning, management, and orchestration. We want to help you establish a common infrastructure that stretches across your workload needs (compute, storage, and network). Because edge computing sites often have limited or no IT staffing, we believe that an elegant edge computing solution is one that can be managed using the same tools and processes as the centralized infrastructure, yet can operate independently in a disconnected mode.

In general, comprehensive edge computing solutions need to be able to:

• Run a consistent deployment model from the core to the edge.
• Offer flexible architectural options to best meet connectivity and data management needs.
• Automate and manage infrastructure from your core data center to your remote edge sites
• Provision, update, and maintain software across your infrastructure, at scale.
• Continue operations at remote edge sites, even when internet connectivity is not reliable.
• Include a robust software platform that can scale in and out.
• Secure data and infrastructure in security-challenged edge environments.

Red Hat’s broad portfolio provides the connectivity, integration, and infrastructure as the basis for the platform, application, and developer services. These powerful building blocks enable customers to solve their most challenging use cases.

A foundation that works

It all starts with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® as our foundation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a large ecosystem of tools, applications, frameworks, and libraries for building and running applications and containers.

Containerized workloads

For building, deploying, and managing container-based applications across any infrastructure or cloud—including private and public datacenters, or edge locations—choose Red Hat® OpenShift®. It’s a container-centric, high-performance, enterprise-grade Kubernetes environment.

Virtual machine and high-performance computing workloads

Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform, with distributed compute nodes, supports the most challenging virtual machine workloads, like network functions virtualization (NFV), and high-performance computing workloads. It’s a reliable and scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that includes industry-standard APIs with hard multitenancy. Make it easier to place your compute power closer to the data source with this consistent, centralized management solution for your core datacenters to the edge.

Messaging and communication

Red Hat Application Services and developer tools provide cloud-native capabilities to develop fast, lightweight, scalable edge applications with data aggregation, transformation, and connectivity to support edge architectures. In highly distributed environments, communication between services running on edge sites and cloud needs special consideration. The messaging and data streaming capabilities of Red Hat AMQ support different communication patterns needed for edge computing use cases. Messaging, combined with a variety of cloud-native application runtimes (Red Hat Runtimes) and application connectivity (Red Hat Integration), offers a powerful foundation for building edge-native data transport, data aggregation, and integrated edge application services.

Management

Red Hat offers a powerful portfolio of technologies that extends and complements its open hybrid cloud platforms to manage and scale your hybrid cloud environments.

Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes extends the value of Red Hat OpenShift by deploying apps, managing multiple clusters, and enforcing policies across multiple clusters—at scale. Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes enables organizations to address the needs of demanding edge workloads, like AI and ML use cases, by providing simplified management of edge sites, across the hybrid cloud, from a single point.

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform combines the universal automation language with cloud services and certified content for automating, deploying, and operating the entire edge infrastructure—including networking at-scale—in an extremely efficient and optimized manner.

Several industries are looking at how to bring edge computing together with new application development approaches and cloud operational models to benefit their businesses.

Modernize telecommunications operations at the edge

Telecommunications providers who use the powerful combination of 5G with edge computing offer better user experiences and support bandwidth-hungry apps through a more flexible, agile, and resilient network. By virtualizing their radio access network (RAN), they can quickly scale software-based network functions to place them at the edge. Using multi-access edge computing (MEC), service providers can enable large-scale, latency-sensitive applications for their enterprise customers.

With Red Hat technologies:

Telco​ customers can deploy both containerized and virtualized network functions (NFV) side-by-side on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform or OpenShift virtualization, respectively. Cloud-native workload life cycles are managed using Kubernetes operators, while legacy network infrastructure and functions are automated using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Improve manufacturing efficiency and production control

Using a combination of edge computing and AI/ML, manufacturers benefit from bringing processing power closer to data to speed proactive discovery of potential errors at the assembly line, help improve product quality, and reduce potential downtime through predictive maintenance.

Using edge computing, industrial companies can improve production by closely monitoring and controlling IoT equipment at industrial sites and taking action in real-time to avoid harm to critical infrastructure or worker safety.

With Red Hat technologies:

Industrial and manufacturing​ customers can use Red Hat AMQ streams, a component of Red Hat AMQ, to ingest sensor data. They can use serverless/Apache Camel K to react to events in real-time, store that data locally into Red Hat Storage, and use Red Hat Decision Manager to integrate ML models and execute inferences.

Edge computing requires industry-wide collaboration to support its broad range of use cases. No single vendor will be able to provide a complete edge computing solution, so protecting yourself against lock-in and ensuring you can find interoperable solutions is crucial. That’s where open source comes in. Open source plays a critical role in ensuring that these solutions are created and cared for, now and in the future.

Red Hat’s edge computing solutions are fostered with open source communities in mind. This means more people developing problem-solving software—openly and transparently.

But open source—alone—doesn't guarantee innovation.

Real innovation comes from the exchange of ideas and working together to solve problems. That's what community-powered open source provides. And that’s where Red Hat Open Innovation Labs comes in. Immerse your development team in an intensive, highly focused residency to learn how to build edge computing solutions, the Red Hat way.