Edge is the new battleground for business. The edge is where factories are automating manufacturing, retailers are connecting with customers, and restaurants are delivering new dining experiences. Across industries, businesses are harnessing the power of AI through computer vision and machine learning, to streamline operations and enhance quality. Yet the challenge remains: how to efficiently manage infrastructure and applications at dispersed sites with limited IT resources. To remain competitive, our enterprise customers need a trusted platform so they can focus on the applications and services driving their business outcomes. VMware Edge Compute Stack (ECS) 3.5 addresses these challenges, with today’s introduction of new features field tested by more than 100 customers. Purpose-built for edge, ECS 3.5 simplifies the deployment of applications and infrastructure across thousands of edge locations, while seamlessly automating the management and orchestration of these sites.
Delivering VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator management for edge compute
Building upon the existing telemetry capabilities of the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO), this release introduces zero-touch orchestration capabilities and scaled management of both infrastructure and applications to VMware Edge Compute Stack. For customers facing challenges managing edge devices, applications, and infrastructure across multiple locations, ECS 3.5 offers a simplified solution for edge operations. In fact, some customers have told us that our new release significantly reduces deployment complexity and can reduce the process from months down to minutes.
See how ECS 3.5 works
Discover how easy it is to deploy edge sites in this video, VMware Edge Compute Stack v3.5 in 2 minutes:
VECO features a pull-based architecture, which is ideal for customers with many edge sites and varying levels of connectivity. Similar to how an iPhone updates itself, edge sites update their applications and infrastructure when the edge host is connected and new updates or configuration changes are published.
VMware Edge Compute Stack 3.5 features include:
Zero-touch orchestration: Managing the deployment and application lifecycle across multiple sites with limited IT resources is a significant challenge for organizations. This VECO feature simplifies deployment and application lifecycle management across multiple sites by leveraging GitOps and desired state management. By automating these processes, organizations can ensure consistent and efficient operations, even with limited IT resources.
Pull-based architecture: ECS hosts always initiate the communication to the management plane as a keepalive, and also to fetch any changes to its configuration. This architecture puts much less burden on the management plane, allowing it to achieve a much higher scale. In addition, the ECS hosts have better security because they can be placed behind firewall, NAT, or proxy devices without the requirement for inbound firewall rules or reachability.
Edge fleet management: Managing many edge compute sites presents significant challenges in terms of deployment and operational efficiency. As the number of sites increases, so does the complexity of ensuring consistent management, monitoring, and updates across all locations. With ECS 3.5, customers can manage large-scale edge infrastructure deployments of single hosts by providing streamlined visibility, deployment, operational processes, and now automatic updates within the SaaS-based ECS service.
SaaS delivery model: Customers don’t need to deploy and maintain a management infrastructure. This enables Broadcom to introduce new VECO capabilities in a continuous fashion, and customers can realize the benefits of new innovations immediately.
Decoupled management and control plane: Customers often struggle with inflexible management and control systems which aren’t automated. These can limit deployment options and scalability and make systems unable to provide everything needed to make decisions at edge locations. With ECS 3.5, we provide added deployment flexibility and ensure that the control plane to manage edge workloads is local to the edge location. Additionally, desired state repositories can be hosted at a data center, edge, or in the cloud, providing customers a flexible deployment and configuration model.
Single-node deployments: Customer deployments often need to operate in diverse and sometimes constrained environments, such as retail stores, factory floors, and remote locations. These scenarios demand robust and flexible solutions that can function effectively with minimal infrastructure. Additionally, with the need to scale to thousands of locations, cost efficiency becomes crucial. With ECS 3.5, we provide flexible and robust edge compute solutions by enabling deployments starting with a single-node edge host which supports VM and container workloads and also includes single-node Kubernetes. By minimizing the infrastructure requirements, this solution helps keep costs down, making it feasible to scale to thousands of locations where every dollar counts.
Automatic updates: As customers scale to thousands of locations, the challenges of maintaining edge components are significant. Security vulnerabilities, compliance concerns, and operational inefficiencies become hard to manage. Manual updates and user errors often result in downtime and increased maintenance costs, while outdated software exposes devices to cyber threats and hampers performance.Automatic updates alleviate these pain points by seamlessly ensuring the latest patches, compliance standards, and performance enhancements are applied. This approach enhances security, operational efficiency, and scalability, ultimately delivering a more seamless and reliable experience for customers.
Edge infrastructure and application monitoring: The first release of this feature revolutionizes edge monitoring for our customers. It effortlessly configures metrics gathering and transmission for infrastructure, virtual machines, and Kubernetes workloads. With the included sample implementation of industry-standard monitoring tools (Prometheus and Grafana) and pre-built dashboards, customers can achieve comprehensive local edge monitoring in just minutes. This powerful capability provides immediate insights and streamlined operations.
In summary, with the release of ECS 3.5, our customers will be able to:
Simplify operations to reduce management complexity and operational cost
Manage dispersed environments with limited IT, limited connectivity and limited compute
Automate software patching to reduce support costs and lower risk
Gain visibility into application and traffic behaviors at the edge with integrated telemetry
More than 100 customers participated in the technical preview, and we have incorporated their feedback into the solution.
ECS is uniquely positioned to help customers at the edge
VMware Edge Compute Stack is well differentiated in the market both from a technical and non-technical perspective to uniquely solve customers’ edge challenges:
Lifecycle management for edge apps and infrastructure at scale while accommodating edge challenges: Many sites, limited compute, edge-specific hardware, constrained connectivity, limited IT skill sets
Purpose-built for the edge with support for mission-critical OT environments and industry-specific protocols such as Profinet
Flexibility for edge apps, with relationships with edge app OEMs who benefit from the scale ECS provides
Vertical-focused edge services and support tailored to address customers’ unique challenges
Trusted solution from one of the largest IT infrastructure vendors in the world
Conclusion
The introduction of VECO features in the ECS 3.5 release empowers customers with enhanced features designed to streamline operations, improve management in remote settings, automate maintenance tasks, and boost visibility into application performance. An oil and gas customer stated that they currently need three months, 60 pages of documentation, and custom scripts to deploy hardware to a new edge site. This update exponentially reduces this time and effort, enabling companies to address current edge challenges and pave the way for more efficient and secure edge computing environments.
