Webinar: Fleet Management at Scale: What Changes at 20, 50, and 200 Nodes

Three Nodes Is Easy. Two Hundred Is a Different Job.

Most industrial teams start small with a pilot site, a handful of edge devices, and one engineer running Portainer to keep it organized. That works well at three nodes, but it doesn't scale by doing more of the same. Somewhere between a single site and a distributed fleet, the questions change: who has access to what, how you track what changed and when, and how you patch fifty devices without visiting fifty sites?

This session isn't about new features. It's a practical look at how fleet management changes as node counts grow: how teams structure access across sites and teams, what audit and change tracking looks like at scale, and how update cadence shifts once you can't touch every device by hand.

We'll walk through deployment patterns at 20, 50, and 200+ nodes, using real fleet structure examples.

Key Takeaways

• What actually changes with environment structure and access at scale with the jump from 3 nodes to 300
• How teams group environments and standardize configuration as they add locations to organize for multiple sites, not just more devices
• What role-based access looks like once more people, and more teams, need visibility into the fleet so you can manage access without losing control
• Why audit logging and change history become essential once you can't remember every manual change yourself
• How patch and rollout patterns shift once one-by-one, physical updates stop being realistic so you can plan an update cadence built for a fleet

This webinar is for you if

• You're running Portainer's free Business Edition and starting to feel the edges of what three nodes can do
• You're an OT engineer, controls engineer, or industrial IT lead who's been asked what your setup looks like with more sites, not just more devices
• You've got containers running in production at one site and expect to add more this year
• You're already running Portainer across a handful of sites and want to see what your next stage of growth looks like before you're in the middle of it
• You want to see how fleet management works before you're figuring it out for the first time under pressure

Speaker

Andrew Heimerman is a Field Application Engineer at Portainer, focused on industrial and IoT use cases. Through his work with edge customers across a range of industries, he's seen firsthand where fleet-scale deployments break down, especially the scaling challenges of many distributed sites, and what it takes to make them work. His technical background is in distributed systems, and he is a Certified Kubernetes Administrator. Andrew works closely with customers and Portainer's engineering team on the deployment challenges that separate a working pilot from a working industrial fleet.

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Register now to secure your spot (or to get the recording automatically sent to your inbox if you can't attend live).