As cloud-native technologies migrate to the edge, enterprises are encountering a difficult reality – they have to address the task of managing thousands of downstream clusters in an industry that provides very little guidance on how to do so, according to SUSE GM of Edge Keith Basil.

"The edge is pretty new still, even to this day," and it's created very different circumstances for Kubernetes architecture, he told SDxCentral. In the pre-edge era, enterprises getting into Kubernetes had to manage "maybe three to five enterprise, big, beefy clusters" compared to numbers in the thousands today.

The edge can be broken down into the near edge, far edge, and tiny edge, Basil explained, touting the SUSE Rancher management platform's ability to interact with all those areas.

Rancher takes care of managing the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters, and SUSE's Edge lifecycle management platform Edge 2.0 enables Rancher to manage the lifecycle of the operating system itself. "That has been a tremendous differentiator for us and a tremendous value play for our customers," Basil noted.

Edge 2.0 allows organizations to deploy applications and manage the upstream updates to Kubernetes. It also supports kernel updates, for example, that need to be rolled out to thousands of locations.

"What SUSE Edge 2.0 offers is a way to do that from the Kubernetes world, which is phenomenal," Basil said. "It's a strong differentiator for us, and I don't see any of our competitors going to that length today."

Red Hat Device Edge, which was announced at KubeCon NA 2022, holds similar goals, but "essentially it was an announcement that they're going to make late next year," he said, highlighting SUSE's prowess in this area.

The main challenge Basil sees enterprises encounter at the edge is scaling massive numbers of Kubernetes clusters. He highlighted SUSE's k3s service as the most widely adopted lightweight Kubernetes distribution for the edge. "[k3s] is really what's driving the edge," he touted.

Basil said k3s boasts more than 20,000 GitHub stars compared to Red Hat's MicroShift, which has fewer than 500. Microsoft also recently announced Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Lite with support for k3s within the hyperscaler's own IP solution.

"It is rapidly becoming the default standard for all things edge when it comes to cloud native and Kubernetes at the edge," he said.

The tiny edge is next on SUSE's agenda, according to Basil. "This industrial IoT space here is going to be the hottest thing starting mid to late 2023. Because once you get k3s or any Kubernetes at the far edge location, the next natural question is how do I get all my devices and sensors at that location brought into a cloud-native ecosystem?"

To that point, Basil described Project Akri as an application running on a local cluster with plugin support to reach out, communicate with, and pull data from industrial IoT devices into containers. "We can do analysis, machine learning, analyze video feeds, check temperature, check humidity – this is going to be the magic that makes edge explode in 2023," he said.

"We want to be well-positioned to take advantage of that," Basil added. SUSE plans to make a productized version of Akri available later in 2023.