Managing multiple Edge and Cloud clusters with Rotterdam

In a previous newsletter we described how Rotterdam can deploy and manage multiple COMPSs workflows and applications in a Cloud infrastructure composed by an Openshift or Kubernetes cluster. This blog entry presents one of the main features implemented during the last year: the deployment and management of multiple containerized applications in multiple Edge and Cloud clusters.

The Rotterdam version developed during the first two phases of the project was able to deploy and manage containerized applications in a single Cloud infrastructure, like Openshift or Kubernetes. This has been improved by enabling the deployment and management of these applications in more than one infrastructure at a time. Now, Rotterdam supports the deployment, management and monitoring of multiple containerized applications and workflows on multiple containerized orchestrators at the same time, thus allowing final users to select where to run their applications, from Cloud infrastructures to Edge devices implementing containerized orchestrators. We describe these in the following sections.

MicroK8s and Edge devices

MicroK8s is a lightweight version of Kubernetes suitable for Edge, IoT and developer workstations, and it is very easy and fast to install. It supports Windows, MacOS and a wide range of Linux distributions. This light Kubernetes version is used by Rotterdam to deploy and manage applications in remote hosts, including Edge devices.

Moreover, Rotterdam allows users to install at runtime new MicroK8s instances in remote devices. To do that, users have to define a connection to a remote device in order to proceed with the installation. After the connection is established, MicroK8s is installed, so Rotterdam can then manage this MicroK8s instance to further install and run containerized applications in these devices.

Management of multiple Cloud and Edge containers orchestrators

Apart from these MicroK8s Edge devices, Rotterdam can also establish connections to other orchestrators located in Cloud and Edge. This way Rotterdam can manage all of them from one single point, enabling the final users the deployment of containerized applications in multiple locations, according to their needs.

Demo video

This blog also provides a video demo showing these new features: the deployment of containerized tasks (a nginx web server application) in Edge and Cloud using a Rotterdam instance deployed in our main testbed, an Openshift cluster composed by four hosts.