Wednesday March 15, 2023
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Edge Essentials is officially available: The new offering is a response to customers’ desire to operate Kubernetes at the edge and orchestrate workloads and optimize business processes.
AKS Edge Essentials is a Microsoft-managed, lightweight Kubernetes distribution purpose-built for easy deployment to OT Edge devices. These are devices used in industrial environments, such as B. Machines in factories, hospital equipment or sales terminals.
AKS Edge Essentials offers a small footprint and a simplified deployment experience. Resource configurations can be specified to share resources on the host device between containerized workloads and native applications. This means that this AKS service can also be used on devices with limited resources.
Managed with Azure Arc
An AKS Edge Essentials cluster can be deployed on a single machine or on multiple Kubernetes-style machines, depending on the requirement. The clusters can be managed using Azure Arc as an Azure resource. This is particularly useful for OT Edge deployments, where thousands of individual clusters are running, each containing only a few workloads. In contrast, the cloud has fewer clusters but thousands of containers running in them. The distributed nature of clusters at the OT edge can quickly become a management challenge. Azure Arc can help with management by allowing to manage AKS Edge Essentials clusters as an Azure resource and leverage cloud services like GitOps, Azure Monitor, Azure Policy and other Arc-enabled services based on AKS Edge Essentials Clusters can be expanded.