For manufacturers, staying competitive means keeping up with technological advancements, including critical software that drives manufacturing processes. But manufacturers can find it challenging to update software, given the constraints of many edge sites. GitOps is emerging as a powerful solution to optimize edge site management and enable manufacturers to stay ahead in the digital era.
Moving from static systems to managing multiple devices
Traditionally, manufacturing plants relied on server rooms to run various workloads, and the shop floor used many specialized devices such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or purpose-built machines. Once these devices are in place, they need very infrequent updates (if they need updates at all), so they have remained relatively static.
However, the advent of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and manufacturing digital transformation have introduced significant changes. Sensors, cameras, and other digital technologies are now being integrated into manufacturing processes as part of the shift towards smart manufacturing. These technologies enable the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to enhance quality control and predict equipment failures. As a result, manufacturers are incorporating more digital tools into their operations.
These new digital technologies consist of applications running on operating systems and computing hardware. Consequently, the demand for computing power and the number of devices required to support manufacturing digitization has increased enormously across the shop floor. This marks a departure from the previous static setup, which required minimal changes once established.
Now, manufacturers must continuously manage and update new applications and devices while ensuring they meet security standards. The challenge lies in finding a scalable way to keep up with the demand for new applications, swiftly implement updates and changes, and maintain control over the infrastructure and applications within the factory.
The increasing amount of data generated by the numerous connected devices in manufacturing plants necessitates a consistent infrastructure and standardized methods for data collection, analysis, and transmission. Implementing edge computing—with edge devices that can perform data analysis close to where it is created—can significantly reduce bandwidth requirements and increase response times. But to avoid an operations nightmare, it is crucial that edge devices and applications can be managed at scale.
Manufacturers benefit from automation at scale with GitOps
To achieve automation at scale, the first step is to standardize the processes you want to automate. This is crucial for our customers who need to manage hundreds or thousands of edge nodes with various configurations.
GitOps enables every aspect of the infrastructure and applications at these edge nodes to be defined through desired-state configuration that is traceable and auditable. For example, you can specify which applications to run and how each device should be configured, ensuring consistency until changes are needed. These desired state configurations, or files, stored in a Git repository, offer an easy way to leverage powerful features like version control. This means you can easily revert to a previous configuration if necessary, whether it was set yesterday, last week, or six months ago.
By treating infrastructure as code, Git also allows for thorough auditing. You can review past versions to identify any modification that was made, and understand the impact of those changes. This level of auditability and control is a significant advantage of using GitOps.
Consistency is key in edge environments, despite the diverse hardware deployed within and across production sites. The more we abstract away hardware differences, the better we can maintain uniformity and minimize configuration drift.
Additionally, the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline benefits from GitOps. Changes can be automatically validated to ensure they are not malformed, syntax and style meet the guideline or best practices, and can be validated prior to the changes being rolled out to all edge nodes. Any changes to the desired state can be automatically tested to ensure they work as intended.
In summary, GitOps provides a robust framework for managing edge environments with automation, consistency, and reliability, ensuring updates are seamlessly integrated and fully tested before widespread deployment.
Why should manufacturers implement GitOps?
Here are just a few reasons why Gitops makes sense at the edge:
- Consistency: Edge environments often consist of distributed and diverse hardware and software components. GitOps ensures consistency across these environments by having the desired state of the infrastructure and applications in a version-controlled repository. This helps in maintaining uniformity and reduces configuration drift.
- Version control: By using Git as the source of truth for configuration and deployment manifests, you can easily track changes, revert to previous states, and collaborate effectively across distributed teams. This version control capability is essential for managing edge deployments where updates may need to be rolled back quickly in case of issues.
- Automation: GitOps embraces automation to synchronize the desired state defined in the Git repository with the actual state of the edge infrastructure and applications. Automation tools continuously monitor the Git repository for changes and automatically apply them to the edge environment, reducing the need for manual intervention and minimizing human error.
- Auditing and compliance: With GitOps, every change to the edge infrastructure and applications is logged in the Git repository, providing a comprehensive audit trail. This audit trail is valuable for compliance purposes, allowing organizations to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements and internal policies.
- Scalability: Edge environments often scale dynamically based on demand or geographical distribution. GitOps provides a scalable approach to managing these dynamic environments by abstracting away the underlying complexity of provisioning and configuring edge resources. As the infrastructure scales up or down, GitOps ensures that the desired state is maintained consistently across all instances.
- Resilience: Edge deployments are susceptible to network disruptions, hardware failures, and other unpredictable events. By defining the desired state of the infrastructure and applications declaratively, GitOps enables rapid recovery and resilience. In the event of a failure, the desired state can be re-applied to restore the system to a known good state automatically.
The role of VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator
VMware Edge Compute Stack provides a compute and orchestration platform to incorporate new Smart Manufacturing technologies, while consolidating existing functions delivered by applications running on dedicated hardware or special devices. Modern applications, written on containers, can run concurrently with VM-based applications on a system capable of running real-time and non-real-time workloads repeatedly and deterministically on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Edge Compute Stack’s orchestration platform, VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO), is designed to simplify the way manufacturers deploy and manage the lifecycle of applications and infrastructure.
With VECO, you can describe every part of your infrastructure as code. Typically, customers manually deploy and configure each component before shipping them to edge locations. For instance, one customer told us that building each site required a 60-page document and an external systems integrator, taking about a month and often resulting in varied outcomes due to human error.
Once these desired-state configuration files are created, they can be version controlled. This means that from an audit perspective, you can track what was deployed at any site on any given date and time, see how and when security patches were applied, and revert to previous versions if issues arise.
Storing these files in Git allows for CI/CD pipeline integration. When changes are checked into the “infrastructure as code,” a virtual version of the host and the applications can be deployed and tested automatically. This ensures that the infrastructure and applications work as expected before deploying to an actual edge location.
After successful testing, the approval and deployment pipeline can gradually update sites. Each location pulls its new configuration, making changes to the infrastructure, virtualization layer, Kubernetes, and applications, whether they are VMs or containers. Canary deployments are a common practice, starting with a single location for careful monitoring, then expanding to 10 sites, and eventually 100, as confidence in the changes grows.
GitOps and VMware Edge Compute Stack keep manufacturers ahead of the game
Manufacturers must stay competitive by keeping up with technological advancements, including software updates, which can be challenging at edge sites. GitOps provides a solution for managing and updating infrastructure and applications at scale. It offers consistency, version control, automation, auditing, and scalability, crucial for handling the growing digital infrastructure in smart manufacturing. VMware Edge Compute Stack, with orchestration by VECO, vastly simplifies and reduces the cost of operating applications on the shop floor.
Watch this short 2 minute overview or see the details in this 8 minute demo. You can try VECO for free at support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/trials-program or reach out to us at [email protected].
Learn more
- VMware Edge Compute Stack 3.5 simplifies app and infrastructure deployment across thousands of edge locations with automation. See the details in our blog, Redefining Edge Operations with VMware Edge Compute Stack 3.5.
- Purpose-built operational technology infrastructure is key to edge success. Read our blog, Edge Operations Require a Solution Built for the Edge.
