Bringing manufacturing to the edge with Red Hat OpenShift

We are excited to announce today that Siemens is using Red Hat OpenShift to help its customers leverage the open hybrid cloud for edge deployments in the manufacturing industry. Let's take a look at why this is important for Siemens and why the approach is important for the industry at large.

With Red Hat OpenShift for MindSphere, Siemens industrial IoT as a service solution, manufacturers will be able to run MindSphere across the hybrid cloud, including on-premise, for speed and agility in factory floor operations, as well as in the cloud for seamless product support, updates and enterprise connectivity. With MindSphere on Red Hat OpenShift, manufacturers will have control over factory floor data processed at the edge, as well as the agility and flexibility they require to meet expectations for higher quality products.

No edge without hybrid cloud

One year ago, almost to the day, Red Hat president and CEO Paul Cormier wrote that edge computing simply does not exist without the open hybrid cloud. Fast-forward to today and that observation is on its way to being an industry standard. Many organizations have begun exploring what innovation at the edge could mean for them and according to IDC, worldwide spending on edge computing will reach $250 billion in 2024.¹ As investment ramps up, enterprises are looking to an open hybrid cloud model to help build an edge infrastructure that is scalable and secure. 

The goal with edge is fairly simple, faster response times for more timely services. For that, data and data processing must remain close to those workloads -- meaning that computing resources are geographically dispersed, making it impossible to manage each of these deployments without a shared, common control plane. Hybrid cloud provides this common language for consistency, scalability, security and more that can be spoken across from the core all the way to the edge. 

Beyond the need for hybrid cloud, edge computing’s foundation must be open. We’ve seen time and again that fragmentation spells the death of new technologies. When using multiple vendors  for edge needs, without open technologies across an organization's edge landscape they could too easily get locked into one infrastructure. 

Red Hat OpenShift and Siemens at the edge

Red Hat OpenShift has long provided a control plane across the hybrid cloud but we have also focused efforts around updating OpenShift to better meet the unique needs of edge-specific deployments like Siemens'. 

A few of the latest edge related updates include three-node cluster support, which brings the capabilities of the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform to bear at the network’s edge in a smaller footprint. We’ve also added remote worker nodes. 

Remote worker nodes enable IT organizations to place single worker nodes in remote locations that can then be managed by centralized supervisor nodes at a larger site, such as a core or regional datacenter. This provides an additional topology choice to organizations pursuing Kubernetes innovation at the edge. 

As more organizations turn to edge deployments, Red Hat is working to further equip our portfolio to meet changing demands and enable organizations to build on open, standards-based innovation across their entire IT estate. More information about Red Hat’s portfolio helps enable edge computing can be found here. A blog from IBM about this collaboration can be found here.