Book Image

Edge Computing Systems with Kubernetes

By : Sergio Méndez
Book Image

Edge Computing Systems with Kubernetes

By: Sergio Méndez

Overview of this book

Edge computing is a way of processing information near the source of data instead of processing it on data centers in the cloud. In this way, edge computing can reduce latency when data is processed, improving the user experience on real-time data visualization for your applications. Using K3s, a light-weight Kubernetes and k3OS, a K3s-based Linux distribution along with other open source cloud native technologies, you can build reliable edge computing systems without spending a lot of money. In this book, you will learn how to design edge computing systems with containers and edge devices using sensors, GPS modules, WiFi, LoRa communication and so on. You will also get to grips with different use cases and examples covered in this book, how to solve common use cases for edge computing such as updating your applications using GitOps, reading data from sensors and storing it on SQL and NoSQL databases. Later chapters will show you how to connect hardware to your edge clusters, predict using machine learning, and analyze images with computer vision. All the examples and use cases in this book are designed to run on devices using 64-bit ARM processors, using Raspberry Pi devices as an example. By the end of this book, you will be able to use the content of these chapters as small pieces to create your own edge computing system.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Edge Computing Basics
7
Part 2: Cloud Native Applications at the Edge
13
Part 3: Edge Computing Use Cases in Practice

Introducing K3s and its architecture

K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution created by Rancher Labs. It includes all the necessary components inside a small binary file. Rancher removed all the unnecessary components for this Kubernetes distribution to run the cluster, and it also added other useful features to run K3s on the edge, such as MySQL support as a replacement for etcd, an optimized ingress controller, storage for single node clusters, and more. Let's examine Figure 2.1 to understand how K3s is designed and packaged:

Figure 2.1 – The K3s cluster components

In the preceding diagram, you can see that K3s has two components: the server and the agent. Each of these components must be installed on a node. A node is a bare-metal machine or a VM that works as a master or agent node. The master node manages and provisions Kubernetes objects such as deployments, services, and ingress controllers inside the agent nodes. An agent node oversees the processing of information...