The push for application modernization isn’t just an IT department concern anymore—it’s a fundamental requirement for the modern Operational Technology (OT) environment. Factory floors, energy grids, and logistics hubs are brimming with opportunities for improvement, and the people who know these processes best are your OT experts: the factory workers, engineers, and floor supervisors.
They have the knowledge and motivation to optimize their daily operations. The problem? Traditional, complex IT infrastructure has been a towering obstacle to getting their ideas off the ground.
OT Modernization Challenges
For years, operational staff have sought ways to digitize and improve their workflows, often turning to low-code development tools like Node-RED to quickly build applications. These tools are fantastic for rapid prototyping and connecting industrial systems, but they still run into challenges when it comes to deployment, security, and enterprise scale.
The primary obstacles for these citizen developers include the following.
- Complexity of Deployment: Setting up robust, secure, and scalable environments (like Kubernetes clusters or virtual machines) is a full-time IT job, not an OT one.
- Lack of Unified Support: OT and IT platforms often live in silos, leading to fragmented security, inconsistent management, and painful handoffs.
- Security and Robustness: A quickly deployed application must run on a secure, reliable foundation that meets industrial uptime and regulatory standards.
VMware VCF Edge: A Unified Platform for Both IT and OT
This is where VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Edge completely changes the game.
VCF Edge is designed to bring the robustness and management simplicity of the core data center right to your remote or edge sites—whether that’s a factory floor, a retail branch, or a substation. Crucially, it provides a unified, consistent platform for both IT and OT applications.
| Feature | OT Team Benefit | IT Team Benefit |
| Unified Platform | Focus on running and developing apps (like Node-RED), not managing hardware. | Consistent operating model from the core data center to the edge. |
| Simplified Deployment | Easy, fast onboarding of workloads like low-code development tools. | Automated, repeatable deployment across potentially hundreds of edge sites (GitOps). |
| Security and High Availability | Peace of mind that applications run on an enterprise-grade, secure, highly available foundation. | Centralized security policies, governance, and compliance. |
Data Protection: Ensuring Uninterrupted Operations
For OT applications where data integrity and zero downtime are paramount—such as production monitoring, quality control, or safety systems—VCF Edge is engineered to handle failures gracefully. The platform’s core functionality provides automatic storage redundancy and high availability across its local infrastructure.
This capability gives the OT team the assurance they need for continuous operation.
- No Single Point of Failure: If a server component fails, the application’s data is still accessible from other nodes in the cluster, ensuring uninterrupted operational flow and preventing costly downtime.
- Simplified Management: This robust data protection is managed automatically by VCF, eliminating the complexity and manual overhead associated with deploying and maintaining traditional storage systems at the Edge.
Real-World Impact: The Citizen Developer Workflow
Imagine an OT maintenance technician who identifies an opportunity to reduce equipment failure by analyzing vibration data. Historically, this meant submitting an IT ticket that could take months to provision the necessary infrastructure.
With VCF Edge, the citizen developer workflow is dramatically simplified. All necessary workloads—from data ingestion to analytics—can be run securely on the same VCF Edge platform.
- Data Ingestion & Tagging: The OT developer uses Node-RED to easily connect to industrial protocols (like OPC UA or Modbus), retrieve real-time data from sensors and PLCs, and tag the data for context.
- Persistent Storage: Node-RED feeds this tagged operational data directly onto a robust database (e.g., PostgreSQL) also running as a workload on the VCF Edge platform.
- Visualization & Analytics: Other workloads are deployed on the same cluster for analysis:
- Visualization Tools (like Grafana) pull data from the database to give the technician immediate trends and diagnostics.
- AI/ML Models (developed by the IT team or a data scientist) run locally on VCF Edge to identify anomalies in the data, predicting equipment failure before it happens.
This developer workflow example is illustrated in detail at https://github.com/shogokbys/vmw-ecs-solutions/tree/main/local-data-cache, highlighting a demo solution built around the Node-RED development tool, which can be easily deployed as a container on a vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) cluster using this example YAML manifest:
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apiVersion: v1 kind: Namespace metadata: name: node-red --- apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: labels: app: node-red name: node-red namespace: node-red spec: ports: - name: "1880" port: 1880 protocol: TCP targetPort: 1880 selector: app: node-red sessionAffinity: None type: LoadBalancer --- apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: labels: app: node-red name: node-red namespace: node-red spec: replicas: 1 selector: matchLabels: app: node-red strategy: type: Recreate template: metadata: labels: app: node-red spec: securityContext: fsGroup: 1000 containers: - image: nodered/node-red imagePullPolicy: Always name: node-red ports: - containerPort: 1880 protocol: TCP resources: {} env: - name: TZ value: Asia/Tokyo - name: PGID value: "1000" - name: PUID value: "1000" volumeMounts: - name: nodered-storage mountPath: /data volumes: - name: nodered-storage persistentVolumeClaim: claimName: nodered-pvc --- apiVersion: v1 kind: PersistentVolumeClaim metadata: name: nodered-pvc namespace: node-red spec: accessModes: - ReadWriteOnce resources: requests: storage: 1Gi storageClassName: vsan-esa-default-policy-raid5 |
Installing and managing VKS clusters is beyond the scope of this article, if you would like to learn more, please refer to the Broadcom documentation.
The key takeaway: All these interconnected, mission-critical applications—from the low-code logic to the high-performance AI—are consolidated onto one unified, secure, and resilient platform managed by VCF Edge.
The Outcome: Actual Productivity and Faster Modernization
By providing a robust, simple, and unified deployment platform, VCF Edge minimizes the complexity barrier that has historically separated OT innovation from its potential.
This is the next level of application modernization: It’s not about IT dictating solutions; it’s about IT empowering OT to lead the charge. This synergy is key to realizing benefits like:
- Increased Agility: Rapidly test and deploy new operational improvements without waiting for complex infrastructure setup.
- Optimized Uptime: Leverage the platform’s mature virtualization capabilities to ensure mission-critical OT applications remain highly available.
- Consistent Security: Extend enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance to the deepest edge of your operations.
The factory worker’s motivation to solve a problem, combined with the power of an easily accessible, modern platform like VCF Edge, is the winning formula for operational excellence.
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