EdgeOps
DevOps refers to the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support. DevOps is also characterized by operations staff making use of many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work. These techniques can range from using source control to testing to participating in an Agile development process. DevOps has a set of values, principles, methods, practices and tools. EdgeOps is a new area that will see traction in the future. Just like DevOps, EdgeOps will have a set of values, principles, methods, practices and tools related to Edge apps and services development, testing and delivery. EdgeOps will have its own set of tools and processes that can be deployed within Enterprises or it will be offered as a Service on Alef’s SD-ME platform. This is referred to EdgeOps as a Service (EOaaS).
There are three primary practice areas that are usually discussed in context of DevOps.
- Infrastructure Automation – create your own systems, OS configs, and app deployments as code.
- Continuous Delivery – build, test, deploy your apps in a fast and automated manner.
- Site Reliability Engineering – operate your systems; monitoring and orchestration, but also designing for operability in the first place.
Edge Application Enviornment
An Enterprise developer can Develop, Deploy, Secure, Manage and Reuse code easily, and convert legacy monolithic applications that are running on-prem to fully cloud-native applications that can run on-prem, in the cloud or in hybrid environments.
Just as companies have revolutionized and accelerated the development of applications and made them Cloud-ready, by modeling on this vision, Alef will provide a platform with connectors, APIs, and SDKs to easily convert existing applications that are running in the Cloud or on-prem to Alef’s SD-ME platform.
This will enable developers of all stripes to easily harness the power of the Edge by Edge enhancing their existing applications and being able to build a whole new class of native Edge applications. Intelligently rearchitecting applications for the Edge is one of Alef’s core competencies. We apply our knowledge of CUPS principles to keep certain microservices at the Edge and the rest in the Cloud services layer, so those microservices that are performance-sensitive stay on the
AIOps at the Edge
AIOps stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations. It refers to multi-layered technology platforms that automate and enhance IT operations through analytics and machine learning (ML). AIOps platforms leverage big data, collecting a variety of data from various IT operations tools and devices in order to automatically spot and react to issues in real-time while still providing traditional historical analytics.
This is particularly important for the Edge where workloads are dynamic, and not static as they are with the traditional hypercloud, where workloads don’t change from one server to another. In a traditional hypercloud environment, if a server goes down, redundancy ensures another server starts up, and workload dimensioning is generally predictable and static. With the Mobile Edge, things are very different – because of mobility and the user plane moving around, servers, storage and switching capacity have to be able to dynamically sense, calibrate and adjust to continuously changing Edge compute demands. So the level of measurement, allocation and automation needed is significant. Likewise, there is a huge premium on observation, data analysis, anomaly detection, performance analysis and knowledge management. Dashboards are very critical as well – making everything visible and actionable for network administrators.