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Tag: Open Horizon

  • Onboard edge computing devices with SDO and Open Horizon

    By Joe Pearson, Engineering Strategy and Innovation Leader, IBM Edge Computing

    For many companies, setting up heterogeneous fleets of edge devices across remote sites has traditionally been a time-consuming and sometimes difficult process. This week at the Open Networking & Edge Summit conference, IBM announced that Intel’s Secure Device Onboarding (SDO) solution is now fully integrated into Open Horizon and IBM Edge Application Manager and available to developers as a tech preview.
    The Intel-developed SDO enables low-touch bootstrapping of required software at device initial power-on. For the Open Horizon project, this enables the agent software to be automatically and autonomously installed and configured. SDO technology is now being incorporated into a new industry onboarding standard being developed by the FIDO Alliance.
    Developers can try this out by using the all-in-one version of Open Horizon. Simply run a one-line script on a target edge compute device or VM and simulate powering-up an SDO-enabled device and its onboarding.
    Both Open Horizon and SDO recently joined the LF Edge umbrella, which aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. Thanks to IBM’s participation in the LF Edge open source community, contributors in the community are helping advance the future of open edge computing solutions.
    Simplifying edge device onboarding
    Our team uses the term “device onboarding” to describe the initial bootstrapping process of installing and configuring required software on an edge computing device. In the case of Open Horizon, that includes connecting it to the Horizon management hub services. We have simplified the software installation process by providing a one-liner script, so that a person can install and run a development version of Open Horizon and SDO on a laptop or in a small virtual machine.
    Before SDO was available, the typical installation process required a person to open a secure connection to the device (sometimes on premises), manually install all of the software pre-requisites, then install the Horizon agent, configure it, and register it with the management hub. With SDO support enabled, an administrator simply loads the voucher into the management hub when the device is purchased and then associates the configuration. When a technician powers on the device and connects it to the network, the device automatically finds the SDO services, presents the voucher, and downloads and installs the software automatically.
    Integrating SDO into Open Horizon
    The Open Horizon project has created a repository specifically for integrating the SDO project components into the Open Horizon management hub services and CLI. The SDO rendezvous service runs along side the management hub and provides a simple interface to bulk load import vouchers.
    Visit SDO GitHub
    LF Edge and open source leadership
    The LF Edge organization continues to strive to ensure that edge computing solutions remain open. In May 2020, IBM contributed Open Horizon to LF Edge. With Intel also contributing SDO to LF Edge, this ensures that another vital component of a complete edge computing framework is also open source.
    We’re excited to collaborate with Intel to expand the deployment of applications from open hybrid cloud environments down to the edge, making them accessible, secure, and scalable for the developer ecosystem and community.
    Visit our booth to watch the demo
    The virtual demo will premiere this week at the conference. Videos will be available in the virtual booth and via the LF Edge YouTube Open Horizon plalist, and representatives from both IBM and Intel will be on-hand to answer questions.
    The booth schedule is:

    • Monday, September 28. The booth is open 9:00 – 10:15 AM, EST. Booth Crawl at 4:00 – 5:30 PM, EST.
    • Tuesday, September 29. The booth is open 9:30 – 11:30 AM, EST.
    • Wednesday, September 30. The booth is open 10:00 – 11:30 AM, EST.
  • IBM Looks to Drive Edge Computing

    IBM Looks to Drive Edge Computing

    IBM today at its Think Digital conference launched an edge computing initiative anchored around an IBM Edge Application Manager, through which a single administrator can manage up to 10,000 nodes.

    Hillery Hunter, vice president and CTO for IBM Cloud, said IBM Edge Application Manager is based on the Open Horizon open source software originally developed by IBM that is now under the auspices of LF Edge, an arm of The Linux Foundation focused on networking and edge computing platforms. Open Horizon makes uses of machine learning algorithms to automate the management of fleets of edge computing platforms.

    IBM also launched IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager to orchestrate both virtual and container network functions. IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager is built on top of an instance of Red Hat OpenShift, which is based on Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

    Finally, IBM is making available a range of edge-enabled applications, including IBM Visual Insights, IBM Production Optimization, IBM Connected Manufacturing, IBM Asset Optimization, IBM Maximo Worker Insights and IBM Visual Inspector.

    Like most IT vendors IBM sees the rise of application workloads on the edge as an opportunity to drive adoption of hybrid cloud computing. In the case of IBM, all of these offerings run on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

    IBM also announced the IBM Edge Ecosystem, which brings together independent software vendors (ISVs) and IBM partners to craft edge computing solutions. Additionally, IBM launched the IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem, which is more narrowly focused on edge computing platforms deployed for telco-focused environments such as a wireless 5G network.

    IT vendors participating in those initiatives with IBM include Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Juniper, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung, Packet & Equinix, Hazelcast, Sysdig, Turbonomics, Portworx, Humio, Indra Minsait, EuroTech, Arrow, ADLINK, Acromove, Geniatech, SmartCone, CloudHedge, Altiostar, Metaswitch, F5 Networks and ADVA.

    Edge computing will undoubtedly force organizations to embrace DevOps more aggressively. Managing thousands of edge computing platforms will require not just higher levels of IT automation infused with machine learning algorithms, but IT teams will also need to be able to deploy, secure, update and manage applications distributed across thousands of endpoints.

    IBM, of course, is not the only IT vendor eyeing the edge computing opportunity. The challenge IT organizations will face first is building new classes of latency-sensitive applications running in near real-time that will be built mainly using microservices. Once those applications are built, organizations will then need to update them continuously within the context of a highly scalable IT management framework.

    Naturally, some organizations will prefer to rely on external IT service providers to rise to that challenge while others will continue to build and manage their own applications and infrastructure. Regardless of the approach, the level of scale and complexity at which IT is being applied is about to reach a level that once would have been unimaginable. Not only will more applications run in near real-time, those applications will be integrated and share data with batch-oriented applications running in the cloud and local data centers. The challenge is finding a way to automate the management of IT at scale without requiring organizations to rely on manual processes, for which there are simply not enough IT professionals available to manage.