Can’t I just use my same data center virtualization software at the edge? Zededa founder and CEO Said Ouissal says he hears this question a lot. The answer, he says, is a hard "no."

As enterprises increasingly adopt edge computing, they want the same virtualization benefits that they are used to in their data centers — and have come to expect from the cloud. It presents a massive opportunity, and because of this many vendors like VMware and Cisco that offer virtualization technology are also moving into edge computing and IoT.

But according to Ouissal, virtualization at the edge requires more than simply running the same data center software on edge and IoT devices. One of the big reasons for this is that edge compute devices are leaner than data center servers, which means virtualization software can’t eat up too many resources.

“The same way VMware applied virtualization to the data center, what we do is apply virtualization to these low-cost compute nodes,” Ouissal said. “We are the only virtualization company that’s solely focused on edge.”

The startup officially launched in April 2018. Earlier this year it contributed Project EVE (Edge Virtualization Engine) seed code to the Linux Foundation’s new LF Edge group.

Edge virtualization require five key features, “and pretty much every existing solution does not meet the five,” Ouissal said.

The first, he said, is “whatever you do at the edge has to be zero touch. You can’t log into these systems by hand. Customers are looking almost for a plug-and-play experience at the edge, which is very different from servers where it’s a high-touch model.”

Additionally, edge environments are diverse. Companies run different types of hardware in different locations — a retail store isn’t the same as an oil rig or a wind turbine, for example — and also send data to different clouds. So edge virtualization software must be hardware and cloud agnostic to avoid vendor lock in. “That freedom is key,” Ouissal said.

“The third thing is: the edge is an extension of the cloud,” he added. “That software now needs to move to the edge, which means the edge needs to be cloud native.”

The fourth centers around security. Data center virtualization assumes a certain level of security — for example, that a USB plugged into a server can be trusted — that edge doesn’t have because it doesn’t have a perimeter. “You have to rethink the entire security model from the ground up, and it has to be zero trust,” Ouissal said. For Zededa, this means using open source software running on a gateway. “Transparency is the best way to find vulnerabilities,” Ouissal said. "And we are a big believer in hardware root of trust.”

This is defined by software running on the CPU, and with Project EVE, it ensure the security keys don’t leave the chip. “The motherboard has those keys so we know if a device is real," he explained. “We also use it for encrypting the data, and we use it for verifying data coming from the cloud.”

Zededa’s customers, which include oil and gas as well as alternative energy companies, “love the simplicity” of the vendor’s virtualization software, “but where they really lean is in when we talk about root of trust and how we address security challenges at the edge.”

And finally, edge virtualization has to scale. The edge consists of many distributed sites with a global footprint. While data centers run as many virtual machines (VMs) or containers on the least possible number of servers, the edge flips this requirement. “At the edge I have a very high number of nodes, but relatively few applications per node,” Ouissal said.

While it’s still early in the game for Zededa — and, indeed edge computing in general — Ouissal said he sees major potential for virtualization technology at the edge. “We think it will unlock a whole new market,” he said.