In 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) of China launched a national innovation and development project to build an indust

Using KubeEdge in the industrial internet big data center

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2021-07-21 16:00:13

In 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) of China launched a national innovation and development project to build an industrial big data center. China Mobile undertook the R&D of features related to edge collaboration and data collection in this project.

The first solution we considered was EdgeX. EdgeX is good for data collection and management, but still, it falls short in aspects such as edge-cloud collaboration. It is more an autonomous architecture for the edge and cannot connect to the cloud. We did have some remedies. For example, we can connect EdgeX nodes to the central cloud through a VPN, but the scalability of this remedy is poor.

The second solution is K3s/K8s. Both K3s and K8s do not support edge-cloud collaboration, and K8s occupies too many resources. Although K3s can run with fewer resources, it does not support device management.

Then we tried OpenNESS, which is a universal framework. However, it was too universal for us. We needed to write adapters for almost every platform we needed, for example, Kubernetes at the bottom layer. The development workload was relatively heavy, and device management was not supported.