Kubernetes is the new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and so it makes only sense that the container deployment and management capability is included. Like I said before, this is why Tanzu is included in all the VMware Edge Compute Stack editions. IT platform teams, who design and manage the edge have to expand their (VMware) platform capabilities that allow them to deploy and host containers.

You may ask yourself how you then would design the network. This is true for IT and OT workloads, that’s IT partial IT/OT covergence. VMware vSphere allows you to run VMs and containers on the same platform. This is when VMware becomes relevant again with their (edge) compute stack.

Manufacturing companies are moving to a cloud-native architecture that should provide more flexibility and vendor interoperability with the same focus in mind: To provide a reliable, scalable and flexible infrastructure. While these methods and architectures have been very good, the manufacturing industry realized that this static and inflexible approach resulted in a technology debt, that didn’t allow any innovation for a long period of time. These systems and architectures, which were put into production 15-20 years ago, are still functional. The OT world is typically very hardware-centric and uses proprietary architectures. In manufacturing, OT (operational technology) vendors have just started the adoption of container technologies due to unique technology requirements and the business model that relies on proprietary systems. You most probably have a mix of home-grown and COTS ( commercial off-the-shelf) software, that need to be deployed in your edge locations (e.g., factories, markets, shops etc.). While ECS is great, the purpose of this article is about highlighting different solutions and technologies that help you to build the foundation for a digital manufacturing platform. ECS is a purpose-built stack that is available in three different editions (information based on initial availability from VMworld 2021):Īs you can see, each VMware Edge Compute Stack edition has the vSphere Enterprise+ (hypervisor) included, software-defined storage with vSAN is optional, but Tanzu for running containers is always included. This is why VMware introduced the so-called “Edge Compute Stack” (ECS) in October 2021, which is provides a unified platform to run VMs alongside containerized applications at the far edge (aka enterprise edge). Additionally, some VMware technologies were already deployed at the edge. Which requirement did all my customers have in common? They didn’t want to move their dozens or hundreds of edge infrastructures to the public cloud, because the factories should work independently and autonomously in case of a WAN outage for example. At the same time, customers are looking at new innovations and technologies to connect their machines, processes, people and data in a much more efficient way. Almost all of the large enterprises are migrating workloads from their global (central) data centers to the public cloud.

Without looking at any analyst report and only providing experience from the field, it is clear why. But why is edge becoming so important now? Reliability, stability and factory uptime are not new requirements. If you cannot produce, you lose time and money. It’s about producing things than you can sell. In verticals like manufacturing the edge was always important. Edge is about bringing apps and services closer to where they are needed, especially in sectors like retail, transportation, energy and manufacturing.

In VMware’s view the multi-cloud extends from the public clouds to private clouds to edge. VMware revealed their edge computing vision at VMworld 2021.

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