Red Hat launched Device Edge at KubeCon to help distributed enterprises bring Linux, a lightweight version of Kubernetes and enterprise-grade automation to devices at resource-constrained, far-edge sites.

To push the best of the vendor's capabilities to the farthest endpoint of its customers' edge, "we pulled together a bundle" of three popular Red Hat platforms, Global Head of Intelligent Edge Kelly Switt told reporters last week. The combined platform is ideal for running sophisticated cloud applications on far-edge IoT gateways, industrial controllers, point of sale terminals, vending machines, robots and smart displays.

Red Hat Device Edge is made up of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the vendor's Ansible automation platform and Red Hat MicroShift – a lightweight Kubernetes that can run on small form factor devices. MicroShift allows users to "extend the management, observability and continuous APIs out to the smallest form of compute they may have running at their edge," Switt said.

This singular edge platform can be deployed in two different ways based on the distinct needs of each edge location. Through an integration with the open-source Kubernetes pod manager Podman, the platform addresses very small deployments. But by adding MicroShift during or after deployment, users can bring Kubernetes to dynamic edge environments that need more advanced container orchestration.

To that point, Red Hat claims its new edge computing platform offers more consistent operations at the edge thanks to the use of centralized tools. Applications running on large systems in a data center or cloud and those on the smallest edge devices can all be managed as if in one environment.

Plus, the platform supports bare-metal, virtual and containerized applications for improved workload flexibility.

"An important part of this is not just the fact that we're adding the three things together," added Richard Henshall, Red Hat head of Ansible product management. "That's where adding the automation platform comes in. We're not talking about 20, 30, 40 devices here. We're talking hundreds or thousands, potentially. Some of our customers [are] to the point they've got such a huge amount of scale, they won't be able to do that manually," he said. "Gone are the days of driving a truck out."

In addition, customers have come back to the vendor asking for a combination of the Red Hat technologies they'll need in "a flexible single SKU," Henshall said. "They just want one piece so therefore we try and give them all three in one piece."