Red Hat bolstered its edge efforts with new features coming from updates to its Ansible Automation, Enterprise Linux, and OpenShift platforms.

The Ansible update taps into the platform’s 2.1 release from late last year. That move included a new automated mesh feature that makes it easier to deploy automation at scale across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and edge environments.

Nick Barcet, senior director of technology strategy at Red Hat, explained that the automated mesh feature extends Ansible from being an orchestrator acting as a central hub with many spokes, to now allowing those spokes to have their own spokes.

“[This] makes it a lot more suitable for edge scenarios where your location might not be always reachable, and therefore you need to have a notion of a belay to be able to reach these edge points,” Barcet said in an interview with SDxCentral.

Operationally, this move allows Red Hat to better support IoT deployments, which rely on a significantly increased number of connected devices. The vendor previously worked with third-party vendors in targeting that IoT challenge.

“We were relying on third-party IoT systems like Microsoft Azure IoT that are compatible with our offering, but we didn't have anything ourselves,” Barcet said. “Here, we are now getting there, and based on the extensive library that Ansible already has to talk to various devices, this makes a lot of sense.”

The edge update also taps into Red Hat’s update to its Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) application last October. ACM is a Kubernetes-based application that runs on top of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform.

ACM provides a consistent view of Kubernetes clusters regardless of deployment environment — the edge, data centers, or cloud environments. This allows for reliable management of large numbers of clusters without a permanent connection between Red Hat ACM and the deployment site.

Barcet explained that ACM combined with Ansible Mesh allows for a management layer of devices at the very far edge of a network. “The synchronization enables a much more hands-off management of the edge at every layer through a single tool,” he added.

Continuing on OpenShift, Red Hat updated its enhanced OpenShift Platform Plus product with zero-touch provisioning to automate edge deployments. This includes factory workflows for OEMs that can preload a relocatable OpenShift cluster on their preferred hardware that can then be deployed as a regular cluster.

Red Hat explained that this pre-configured cluster can be used to more quickly deploy resources. It provided examples of deploying radio access networks, error detection for manufacturing facilities, and edge computing applications in any distributed location.

Red Hat also introduced RHEL 9, which is the latest iteration of its long-running enterprise Linux platform. One of that platform’s new updates is the ability for Red Hat’s Podman container management technology to detect if a newly-updated container fails to start and can automatically roll the container back to the previous working version.

RHEL 9 also brings a technology preview of the FIDO Device Onboarding that automates some of the deployment steps at edge locations and creates a security channel for the configuration and onboarding to a management platform.

The updates are set to infuse Red Hat’s Edge system over the coming weeks.