The millions of devices that currently make up the Internet of Things (IoT) reside not in the cloud but on-premises: from retail stores to factory floors. Many of these devices are tiny edge leaf devices like cameras (IP cameras, USB cameras etc.), sensors (smart heat sensors on equipment etc.). It has become increasingly difficult and impractical for developers to write bespoke solutions to detect and use each of the devices and the core DevOps/deployment teams to manage the applications and clusters which host these applications that are positioned in far edge sites (close to end-users).

Most of these devices, however, are too small to run Kubernetes themselves. How can they be leveraged by a Kubernetes workload and how can a private cluster be managed from the cloud?

Anthos clusters on VMware also called GKE on-prem was an offering that enabled users to run GKE in customer datacenters but this model needs vCenter Server and VSphere, but Anthos on bare metal uses a “bring your own operating system” model. It runs atop physical or virtual instances, and supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1/8.2, CentOS 8.1/8.2, or Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS.

#kubernetes